Of all the places that I’ve fought in my long experience, there’s something particularly unpleasant about fighting in palace gardens.I’d done it three or four times, but strangely, the best comparison I could make was to my adventure on Gravalax, even though we hadn’t fired a shot in those gardens.
That was back during the first mission that my dear Valhallan 597th. We, the Emperor’s most loyal, competent, and professional Imperial Guard, had been charged with a very peculiar task – maintaining a temporary peace between the Tau Empire and our own Imperial subjects of the planet.
Negotiations, rather than warfare. Strange, but hardly the most bizarre mission I’d ever been on. Gravalax, you see, had been a tense standoff between the Tau and the Imperium, and neither had been willing to shoot first. That was much the same feeling as I experienced when traveling around New Glasgow, with the tense between the Free Skye movement and the Lyran Commonwealth itself.
Granted, it wasn’t a perfect comparison. Free Skye was willing to shoot and bomb the Lyrans… but crucially, they weren’t doing it en masse. Their actions were the works of small covert cells, rather than any kind of genuinely popular uprising that would engage in open warfare in the streets.Of course in the end, it turned out that the entire Gravalax conflict was being instigated by a sinister cult of gene-stealers, so perhaps it wasn’t a perfect match for the issues here in the Federation of Skye.Still, during the conflict, I’d had the interesting experience of having to escort a delegation of Tau out of the local Planetary Governor’s palace (long may that loathsome bastard burn). We’d holed up, rather instinctively, in a nearby shrubbery. Lucky for me, I’d taken a few looks around Honor of Skye during my first visit a few weeks back, and I knew that this local area was actually quite defensible. Many of the nearby walkways were flanked by white-walled buttresses that were decorative, but also functional cover.Unfortunately at the moment, those same walls were funneling us into a fire-lane, with few places to run. Even worse, as this had been a formal event, I was wearing my formal uniform – which was not armored in any way. I was barely lucky enough to have a ceremonial laser pistol, and I only had a single power cell for it!
The Archducal Guard were no slouches at their jobs, luckily. The brave men who stood up to draw fire away from Margaret Aten were taking shots that would have gone into us, and firing back as much as they possibly could.The initial exchange of fire was over in mere moments. Of the six guardsmen who’d stood to return fire, four of them had fallen with holes blown in their armor, or missing chunks of flesh from where said armor didn’t cover. The remaining two were injured as well, but still standing.I glanced down the way we’d come, and winced at the sight of bodies just a few dozen meters away. I didn’t get a close look, but even from here I could tell that they were wearing civilian suits, and looked like civilians.“Your Grace, are you alright?” one of the guardsmen demanded, as he rolled off the top of his young Archduchess.“I’m fine,” Margaret Aten replied, gasping a little as she looked around, wide-eyed. “What’s – Andre!”
She reached out towards one of the fallen men, and one of her guards pulled her back before she could crawl over to him.“He’s gone, Your Grace,” the man told her bluntly. “We need to get you to the palace, immediately. Stand up, we’re going now.”The guardsmen dragged Aten to her feet, and started barking out orders to the rest of his squad.“Gordon, Stewart, Donnelly, you’re on point,” the man said. I glanced at him, and saw the downward triangle and two bars of an LCAF Sergeant Major, which presumably made him the head of Aten’s security detachment. “The rest of you, form up.”It was undoubtedly the right move, but something about this situation still felt wrong to me. My palms were itching, and not just from the gunfire that had erupted over my head.
There were at most four or five dead gunmen down at the far end. That wasn’t nearly enough people to send on an attempt to assassinate a sitting Archduchess!
I was reminded of the run-in I’d had with Terrence Moore, the pirate, in a random bar just a few weeks back. The weedy looking man had been accompanied by six Free Skye toughs, before panicking and directing all of them to kill me. That had been clearly unplanned… and yet Free Skye couldn’t rustle up more gunman than that, to take a shot at the Archduchess herself? Hell, for that matter, Free Skye had sent an entire BattleMech Company against me. That was an enormous investment in combat capability.
This smelled bad to me.“Wait, wait,” I said, speaking up before the guardsmen could charge off towards the palace. “This isn’t enough men.”The sergeant didn’t even bother glancing at me, and the rest of his men formed up, ready to take off at a fast run towards the palace.“Stop,” Margaret Aten said, staring at me. “What do you mean?”
Her previously stone-faced expression had been shattered, and she was clearly shaken up by the death of her guards, but she was also visibly trying to put herself back together, which I could always respect.
“Four men to kill you?” I asked rhetorically, gesturing at the bodies. “Unlikely. That’s not enough to get past the guards. Free Skye isn’t that stupid. I think there’s more of them up ahead.”I gestured towards Honor of Skye, which was still hundreds of meters away.“An ambush,” I guessed. “This group would scare us into charging off, and then we run right into their guns at a much worse location.”“You can’t know that,” the Sergeant growled in response. “And we don’t have time for this.”“We do have time,” I countered. “But not in that sense. You’ve surely got reinforcements coming, but they can’t say the same. We should get to the closest possible shelter and secure ourselves inside, rather than running a kilometer to the palace.”“Cain’s right,” Aten said, cutting into the Sergeant before he could speak.
All credit to the Sergeant, he didn’t try to argue with Aten for a moment.“To the gardener’s shed,” he barked out to the rest of his squad. “Gordon, on point, now!”The trio of guardsmen took off at a steady jog, their rifles raised and sweeping from side to side. Unlike before, now they were headed to the right, perpendicular to our previous straight-line path towards the palace.
We weren’t long in following them. After only a moment of rest to get Aten ready to run – during which George handed me one of the dead guardsmen’s rifles and tactical webbing, just in case – the rest of us charged after them.
There were twelve of us now. Nine guardsmen, Margaret Aten, George, and me. Not a particularly sizable force, but a good defensive position could make all the difference.Time was the most important factor here. The Archducal Guard had hundreds of men in their ranks at a minimum, and their home base was quite literally only a kilometer away. Add in that there were three separate BattleMech Regiments stationed in New Glasgow, and the weight of numbers and firepower was clearly on our side…
…but not immediately. Free Skye was a large organization, given their history and how widespread their activities were, but they suffered from the same problem that all such organizations did: the numbers of die-hard true believers was always smaller than their total supporters. And since assassinating your own ruler was definitely an extreme act, there was no way that they could have convinced every single one of their members to join in.Those two factors combined made it clear. Striking fast and hard was Free Skye’s only effective tactic.
Honestly, they’d already screwed up royally by not sending their entire strike team against us at the beginning. Aten had been at her scheduled location at a scheduled time, which I had been reliably informed were the two most critical elements of any assassination attempt.
Why not simply send everyone at Aten right there and then? It didn’t make sense. There had to be some kind of reason, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.But I wasn’t going to complain out loud about my lack of understanding. Nor was I going to make the mistake of being happy about Free Skye being too stupid to properly concentrate their forces. That kind of statement would only ever jinx me, as I’d discovered far too often in the past.The most important fact right now was that so long as we lived through the next few minutes, we would survive no matter what.
If no second attack came, then I would be criticized for my paranoia, but I would also be alive to be criticized. Yet if I was right, and there was a second strike team, then they wanted us to follow the standard procedure. To be nice, neat, organized. Predictable. They wanted us to walk right into their prepared position, into their aimed rifles like wheat before the reaper-blade. It wasn’t a bad plan… which is why I was stealing it.
We made it to the gardener’s shed within half a minute, and Aten’s bodyguards wasted no time in opening up a hidden trapdoor in the shed and stuffing their Archduchess inside. “Get ready,” said the Sergeant in charge grimly. “They’ll be coming.”I nodded. I wanted to start giving orders, redeploying the troopers to better positions. But I didn’t. There was no time for a leadership dispute, especially since I had already pushed too hard earlier.The squad of guardsmen had gotten ready for a defense in depth, spreading their numbers out behind the chest-high stone walls, with a pair of them nearly thirty meters in front of the rest of us, in a nearly suicidal position… but an important one. Clustering up was nothing more than a good way to get everyone killed with single grenade. Those two men were the most exposed, but if they slowed down the terrorists for a minute, it might be enough to save the rest of us.My hands ran over my borrowed rifle, and I tried to calm my racing heart by checking it over. It was an autogun, a much more primitive rifle than the laser rifles held by some of the other guardsmen. But it had some advantages – rate of fire and magazine size being the most important right now. I could send a lot more shots down-range than the bodyguards with laser rifles and big, bulky powerpacks on their belts or backs.Now, I should note that we weren’t just sitting there, hoping to kill off every single potential attacker with a glorious defense. That would have been ridiculous. Planning your entire war around defending was an idiotic idea, and taking the initiative was vastly preferable. As they said, the best defense is a good offense.
Since in this case, we couldn’t go on the offensive without having to run across nearly a kilometer of manicured gardens, risking a single shot killing the Archduchess, we were forced to stay put. That did not, however, mean that we were completely out of options.
The Sergeant in charge was using the earbud in his helmet to give out orders, summoning every single available guardsman to our location. I didn’t have a radio headset, or I’d have more details to give in this account, but it seemed obvious to me even at the time that Aten’s guards probably had fast response units in armored vehicles or BattleMechs.
It would take a few minutes to get those fast responders over to us, but once they were here, our survival was virtually guaranteed.
Of course, the enemy knew that too.
Gunshots rang out suddenly, cutting into my musings. I had been right, and there was a second hit squad of Free Skye.
The two green-clad guardsmen in the forward position were the ones to open fire. Each man carried a different weapon – one had an autorifle like mine, the other had a laser rifle with a backpack power supply. The first man shot in long, sustained bursts down the walkway, firing at enemies that we couldn’t see, while the second man took aim with his laser rifle, firing single shots with careful aim.
I couldn’t see the Free Skye forces, blocked from sight as they were by one of the tall stone walls that subdivided the palace gardens into individual sections, but I could see their return fire, and it was heavy.
Dozens, if not hundreds of bullets skipped off the ground and chipped the stoneworks they were hiding behind. A few laser shots in searing red light came as well.
The only reason the return fire didn’t slay the two guardsmen where they stood was because it was unaimed, intended more to suppress the enemy and get enough breathing room to move more safely. But that didn’t make it any safer. Even from where I stood, some of those shots came awfully close to their barely exposed profiles.The guardsmen were forced to duck back into cover, and the autogun wielder reloaded quickly before sticking his gun around the corner and holding the trigger down, firing blindly. A sensible decision, since the incoming fire was so heavy that the Free Skye terrorists could advance swiftly under that cover. A hail of return fire would force anyone not suicidal into cover, at least briefly.
His partner slung his laser rifle, and instead fished out a pair of grenades, immediately chucking one around the corner. It went off without the usual crack or crump of a proper detonation, and I saw smoke rising above the walls. A smoke grenade. The cloud would obscure both sides from each other, and it would slow down the advancing terrorists.
The first man’s autogun clicked empty. Rather than reload and repeat the trick, he instead turned and ran from the position, falling back to the next piece of cover. I stared at the second man, wondering why he wasn’t retreating as well, but then I saw the man throw his second grenade around the corner. He’d been waiting for a few moments for some reason, before hurling the explosive, then turning and running himself.An explosion ripped through the air, indicating that the second grenade had been a proper anti-personnel grenade. In the brief absence of noise, as my ears rang from the earlier gunshots, I heard screams from the walkway.
It clicked to me a moment later. The Archducal guardsman had waited a few moments so that his grenade would catch them in the open, after they started charging through the cover of the smoke.Unfortunately for the man, his patience had also exposed him. Someone shouted out something on the far side, unintelligible over the distance, and a moment later, four grenades came hurling over the walls themselves, arcing high in the air and coming down around us. “Grenades!” George yelled out, before diving to the ground behind the waist-high stone planter that we were using as cover. I did likewise, and not a moment too soon, as the grenades exploded with a string of loud, thunderous cracks!
Counting the explosions, I could have sworn that there were only three booms, but that must have been my ears ringing, because George straightened up after the final explosion, raising his rifle. I did likewise, trusting that my friend and adjutant had been correct.The grenades had shattered most of the pleasant courtyard that we’d holed up in. Statues were shattered and knocked off their plinths, columns were sprayed with shrapnel, and the beautiful flowers had been flattened and shredded. The running guardsman hadn’t been able to make it to cover in time, and he was dead. His body had been blown backwards, away from us. But he hadn’t been the only casualty. My eyes were drawn by an anxious shout, and I glanced over to my right and swore sharply.“Sergeant’s down!” cried one of the Archducal guardsmen, as he frantically tried to apply first aid to the leader of the security detachment.The man had been hit badly, and he wasn’t moving. Worse, after the grenades, we had abruptly gone from eleven men down to seven – and it wasn’t clear who was in charge now. There were five guardsmen left as fighters, and then myself and George.George shot me a look, and made a quick gesture that I recognized as one of our old pirate codes. It was a simple message: ‘put on the hat!’
I swallowed, took a deep breath, and then I took charge of the situation.“Hold your positions!” I roared out, aiming my rifle at the corner of the walls.
It was a simple order, but it was didn’t really matter what I said – I was reassuring the men that we were still alive, that we were still fighting. It was the same focus on morale that my old job as a Commissar had been dedicated to.A gun poked itself around the far wall, firing blindly towards us. The nearest two guardsmen ducked for cover, but I took careful aim and fired back, since the spray of bullets was far less risky to me, thirty meters back. I don’t think I hit him, but he pulled his rifle back, cutting off the bullets. “They’re going to charge!” I warned the squad, already anticipating the next move. It wasn’t any genius realization, no matter what the after-action reports said. As I said earlier, time was running out for the terrorists, and they had to move quickly if they wanted to kill Aten.No sooner had I finished speaking than a group of men came running around the corner. It was too close for grenades, unfortunately, and so all I could do was hold down my rifle’s trigger. The other guardsmen opened fire as well, and bullets and laser beams criss-crossed the courtyard in a harsh exchange.Bodies dropped around me, and I ducked down, reloading as fast as I could. Shots were screaming over my cover, so I leaned around the side of the planter instead, and returned fire from there, where the enemy wasn’t already shooting.Maybe a dozen men came around the corner, maybe two dozen. I didn’t keep count, but any number of men feels like a lot when they’re trying to kill you.George grunted out beside me, and then let out a harsh bark as he returned fire back at someone. He’d been hit, but I didn’t know how bad. I wanted to ask, to check on him, but there was no time. For what felt like an eternity, my entire world narrowed down to just three things: staying behind cover, ensuring I had enough ammo in my gun, and shooting every single person that came around the corner.
I ran through nearly all the spare magazines that I had, until I was on my last one. There seemed to be no more dreadful thought in my mind that I might run out of bullets before I ran out of enemies.Then, after what was probably just a minute or two of intense combat, the shooting died down. No more men came around the corner.“George?” I demanded, looking at my adjutant. “Just a flesh wound,” the man said, refusing to turn around, keeping his eyes pointed firmly down-range while he reloaded his autogun out of muscle memory. Out of the initial thirteen guardsmen from a few minutes ago, only three were still moving now. The first man, the brave one who’d been in the forward position, was dead now. He’d been overrun, but by the looks of things, he’d taken plenty of Free Skye nutjobs with him.
The man who’d been applying first aid to the Sergeant had dropped the attempt and joined the firefight. He was staring down at the entrance to the courtyard, his rifle shaking in his hands as he kept covering it, as if he hadn’t realized that it had ended. “Corporal!” I barked, snapping the man out of his mood. “Check on the Sergeant!” The Archducal guard jolted to life, snapping out a salute towards me and diving back down to take care of his boss.I turned back to the gardener’s shed, and winced. The building had taken a lot of shots, and it looked like swiss cheese now. “Archduchess Aten?” I called, moving into the building as cautiously as I could. “Are you alive?!”
Some of the shed’s roof had come down, and a thin beam of wood had landed on top of the trapdoor, blocking it. I grabbed it and threw it aside. I banged on the top of the trapdoor once, twice, thrice, and called out again.“Your Grace?” I cried out, reaching for the hatch.The trapdoor opened on its own before I could pull on it, and Margaret Aten looked up at me from the inside, aiming a pistol right at my face with wide eyes. “Cain?” she demanded. “Don’t shoot!” I yelped, backing up a step. “It’s me! We’re safe, I swear!”Aten looked at me, her face unchanging for a moment, and then the impact hit her all at once. She let go of the trapdoor, forcing me to hurriedly grab it so that it didn’t smack her in the head, and she let out an awful sob. “It’s going to be okay,” I tried to reassure the woman, as she climbed out of the underground compartment where she’d ridden out the firefight. “It’s going to be-”The young woman nearly tackled me as she came out, her arms wrapping around my chest, and her head burying itself in my arms.I realized then, as she clung to me like a small child, rather than the ruler of a third of the Lyran Commonwealth, that I had perhaps misjudged Margaret Aten.
She’d been so blunt and direct in our previous meetings that I’d associated her with the same powerful individuals that I’d known back on Tharkad or the Imperium. People that were confident because they had extreme amounts of personal power, and they knew it well. Many of them were also veterans, who had seen conflict and come out the other side with hardened minds and attitudes. But despite her high rank, Margaret Aten was not one of those people.
She was a girl of merely twenty, perhaps twenty-one years old. She had lived a poor life, including years both on the cold city streets, and in the halls of the hospital where she was expected to die from her congenital heart condition. And then, after she’d finally been blessed with some happiness, she’d had her second set of parents ripped away just six months before – to the exact same cause that had killed her birth mother: an automobile accident.
Margaret had survived, yes, but merely surviving is an entirely different thing than thriving. The woman had been doing her best to uphold her feudal responsibilities for the last six months, but most of the nobility despised her.
She was all alone in that enormous palace, and now she had just come face to face with her first assassination attempt. Worse, still, was the fact that Free Skye was primarily a lower-class organization. They had political support from many in the upper class, yes, including Aldo Lestrade and Frederick Steiner to various degrees, but their membership had always come from the roughest and toughest of the blue-collar workers. Exactly the kind of person that Margaret had herself been, as a child, and the same kind of person that her mother had been.
She had not just been attacked by her own subjects, but her own people, her own class – the exact people that Margaret publicly championed, threatening to destabilize the static nature of Skye’s class system.No wonder she had been hit hard. For all the hardship she’d had in life, this was a new horror to the young woman. One that she had no experience with, and no ability to control. In this, just like in her new rulership, she must have felt powerless.I hesitated, and then, after a moment to for my brain to kick my body into gear, I dropped my rifle and wrapped my arms around Margaret. “It’s going to be okay,” I told her, lowering my voice so that none of her remaining guardsmen could hear me. “Are you injured? Did anything hit you?”
The Archduchess shook her head, and I let out a sigh of relief.“I’m going to make them pay,” she muttered, the words barely audible through my dirt-streaked and sweaty formal uniform.She pulled away from my torso, and looked up at me, her face firming up, back into the ironclad determination that I’d seen before. This time, unlike when I had first met her in the ballroom those weeks ago, her eyes were not filled with the dullness of certainty, but with the fire of motivation.
“Yes, you are,” I told her with a nod.