The Archducal Guard of Skye filled the gardens as we made our way back to the palace. Dozens of infantrymen had swarmed over the area within minutes of the desperate firefight ending. Many were kitted out in their average day-dress uniforms with battle-rattle thrown over top, while others looked like they were prepared to go toe-to-toe with an enemy assault force, in full combat attire. Of course, infantry alone wasn’t the end of it. Nearly a Company of combat vehicles had arrived, half of them carrying the infantry aboard them. The remaining few were hulking tanks: a trio of Bulldogs, a pair of Manticores, and a very rare Von Luckner, all with their turrets facing outwards in case any more hostiles showed up.
Even now the Archducal guardsmen were hustling Margaret Aten into one of the APC’s, along with myself, George Wentworth and the survivors from her initial bodyguards. A full squad of men joined us inside, sealing the hatch behind themselves, grim-faced and ready to fight to the death.
The ride was quick, since the palace was only about a kilometer away from the gardener’s shed where we’d held off the Free Skye assassins. Only a few minutes after we’d been hustled into the APC, we were hustled out of it, and into a large hangar bay. It was technically still exposed to the outside, but only technically – the hangar’s open doors were already rumbling shut to deny any sniper a clean shot. Just outside the hangar was a Lance of BattleMechs looming over the Company of combat vehicles. I spotted a Flashman, a Warhammer, a Crusader, and a Rifleman. Heavy BattleMechs, the kind that were expected to go into large brawls and come out the other side. Well, save for the Rifleman, but that design was at least useful for anti-anticraft duties, which explained its presence.
I followed along as the squad of Archducal guards hurried us safely through a large blast door, through an airlock, and out into a brightly lit hallway of concrete. Clearly a sub-basement level of some kind, or a service corridor. Even the fanciest of palaces had them, because inevitably the guardsmen got their boots muddy, and nobody wanted them to muck up the fancy carpets upstairs.“This way, Your Grace,” the squad leader said, leading the way through the corridor. We walked for a short while, turning corners until we came to a door emblazoned with the ubiquitous red cross that marked a medicae station. Aten was hurried into an individual assessment room, while myself, George, the ranking Corporal, and the two other survivors were left to stay in the main room.“Injuries?” demanded a man in surgical clothes as he sat me down on a bench seat and pulled off my formal uniform hat, dabbing at my head with a wet rag for no discernable reason that I could tell. “Nothing that I felt,” I told him. “George, there, he took a shot. You should check him out.”“Someone will do that, Hauptmann,” the medic said without a change in his voice, as he pulled my web gear off, and a guardsman took my autogun away from me. “Take off your coat, please. Shrapnel can go unnoticed until later.”I did as I was bid, and soon enough the two layers of my formal uniform had been stripped down to just my cotton undershirt. To my relief, there were no bright red blooms of blood. After a similar stripping down to just my skivvies to check out my lower body, the medic pronounced me as ‘apparently uninjured’, and allowed me to re-dress. Looking over, I saw that George, my adjutant, had drawn far more attention. A medic was currently using surgical scissors to cut his uniform jacket off of his. I knew that he had been shot, but he’d described it as ‘just a flesh wound’. I had been suspicious the moment I heard that old cliché, but I’d been a little distracted by gunshots at the time, and hadn’t been able to check him out.“Where’s the wound?” I called over, unable to hide my concern for my friend.
I’d barely known George for a fraction of the time as many of my old comrades in my home universe, but he was still a friend, and one of the few that I could trust in this dawning era of mankind. The thought of losing him, or worse, having to explain to his wife and young daughter how he’d died, was a strangely worrying thought, considering how many soldiers I’d seen die in my time.
“Shut up, sir, we’re working!” one of the medics called back, as he waved a scanner-wand over George’s wound – which looked to be on his lower torso, near the right side.At least it isn’t a direct gut shot, I thought to myself, but it was poor consolation. The lower torso was a real nightmare to be wounded in, because there were so many messy organs intertwined down there. A shot through one could easily pierce another, and there were no simple patches for those.
The medics were doing the best they could, but I was still concerned as I watched. I hardly wanted to break in a new adjutant, and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to trust them like I did George.It took about a minute, but finally, one of the medics reached a prognosis.“Through and through!” the man announced loudly, with a clearly relieved voice. “I need two medipatches!” One of the other medics dug through a drawer and pulled out two bandages, unwrapping them from single-use plastic in a hurry. The first man wiped away the dripping blood from George’s wound, ignoring the fact that more was still coming out, albeit slowly. After a second pass, he took one of the patches and pressed it firmly into the wound.George closed his eyes, grit his teeth, exhaled harshly through them, sounding like one of the racehorses from the charity event just a half-hour ago. I stood up from my seat and walked over to him, extending my right arm. George grabbed onto my forearm, locking his hand around it as I reciprocated, and he squeezed as he fought through the pain.
The second patch was applied quickly, and after a few moments, George’s tense grip lightened, and his pained expression eased up. It was the painkillers, no doubt. Medipatches were neat little things for surface wounds, and the best part about them was the near instant pain-relief. “He’s good, then?” I asked the closest medic. It looked that way to me, but it was usually better to get a straight answer when you can from those types.“He’ll be fine sir,” the medic replied. “It only went in by a few centimeters, and it missed his organs. Muscle and fat, little more. The medipatches will handle it, but he’ll have a scar.”“Did you hear that?” I asked my adjutant, nudging him with my elbow. “A scar, he says. Is that your first?”George Wentworth opened a single eye, and gave me a gimlet stare with it. I smiled back at him, and squeezed his forearm once before letting go of it. “Thank you George,” I said, dropping the smile and giving him a solemn nod.My adjutant nodded to me, and then closed his eyes again, leaning back against the wall.
Xxxx
“Hauptmann Cain?” a voice asked. I turned, and looked for the speaker. It was one of the Archducal guards, an older man wearing an LCAF Lieutenant’s insignia on his shoulder.“The Archduchess wants to see you,” the guardsman said. “This way.”He didn’t bother waiting for me. Just turned and walked off, towards the exit.I got to my feet and started walking after him, buttoning up my jacket as I did.
It had been about half an hour since we’d got to the palace, and both George and I had been implicitly confined to the medical station. I hadn’t protested, naturally. I can’t blame Margaret Aten’s bodyguards for being paranoid after the assassination attempt, and since the odds were quite low of them trying to execute me, I’d been content to stay put. However, it looked like that little rest was ending.I followed the Lieutenant to a service elevator down the corridor. He punched in a button, and we waited in silence as it ascended up, into the upper floors of the palace. When we emerged, out surroundings were no longer the blank, utilitarian concrete of the palace guard’s corridors, but instead the richly varnished wood and thick carpeting of the palace proper. I recognized the décor instantly, from that welcome ball a few weeks ago, but not the exact rooms. The corridor was smaller, as were the rooms that we passed.
If I had to venture a guess, we were in the private sections of the palace – the places actually reserved for the nobles to live in, rather than merely entertain guests. This was a sign of trust, and it immediately made me very nervous. In my experience, nothing good comes from a Planetary Governor trusting you.
A minute later, I was shown into a large parlor. Bookshelves bracketed one of the walls, filled with old tomes. Tall windows stretched to the ceiling of another wall, letting in daylight. There were couches, and reading chairs, and even a small bar for drinks opposite to the bookshelves. Family portraits filled much of the remaining wallspace. It looked like a place of luxury.The exception to the splendor sat at the center of the room: a large holo-table, bigger than any I’d seen outside of LCAF High Command bunkers and the Nagelring’s lecture halls. At the moment, the emitters were offline… but there were still plenty of people surrounding it. A dozen, perhaps two at the most.
Most of the room’s occupants wore the fancier clothes of the nobility. Some of them were wearing the same summer-formal leisure attire from the horse race. Others wore business suits, and looked like they’d been summoned away from their dayjobs. A few wore uniforms – and I stiffened as I recognized both General Ashberry and General Frederick Steiner among them.But all of them, no matter how powerful they were, were nothing compared to the woman standing at the head of the holo-table, wearing an emerald-green dress that was still splashed with dirt and blood. Her dark skin was flushed with emotion, and she had already slammed a clenched fist into the table’s edge with such force that I almost wondered which would break first: the table, or her hand.
Archduchess Margaret Aten was a young woman, and when I’d met her before, I thought she was a strange mix of hesitation and stoicism. Neither were on display at the moment. She was fierce. Angry. Riled up to a righteous fury, and she was barking orders like a Lord General on the front lines, relieving his glory days.
“I don’t care if they’re useful for de-escalation, I want them arrested and brought in,” Aten was saying as I entered. “Your informants didn’t work. We are incredibly lucky those maniacs didn’t bomb the entire race just to get me. They could have killed thousands of citizens. Your friends and family, Count Erlen.”“Your Grace,” pleaded a man in what looked like an arbites uniform, distinctly not quite military, yet not quite civilian. “I am your humble servant, but the New Glasgow Police Department simply doesn’t have the manpower to arrest all the informants we have, much less every single person we suspect of terrorist affiliations! We have to send at least a dozen officer after each individual one, and there aren’t enough men!”“Find the men,” Aten snapped. “If you need them, I have the authority under the Articles of Acceptance to deputize the Lyran Commonwealth Armed Forces as civilian peacekeepers. We have three Regiments on-planet, and they have tens of thousands of additional personal.”“That authority hasn’t been used on Skye since Robert Marsden himself!” another one of the nobles protested, his eyes wide. “Your Grace, that would cause riots in the street! Yes, by all means, we have to punish Free Skye, but we can’t push the entire population into their arms!”
The hair on the back of my neck rose, and my palms began to sweat as I realized exactly what was happening in the room. Margaret Aten wanted a mass deployment. A crackdown. A show of force.
A purge.
I wanted nothing more than to run from that room at that moment.These kinds of decisions, there’s no winning. Nobody wins in a purge. Nobody comes out better off. Purges are weapons of last resort, like a field amputation, but applied to an entire population! Maybe even an entire planet!My home had known this. The Imperium hated the act of purging their populations… but so many times, it had been the only option. Some horror of the Warp, some abominable intelligence, some eldritch xeno horror had spread its virus across a planet, and there was no saving the people – only saving the people who hadn’t been exposed. We didn’t do it because we enjoyed it. We did it because it was necessary!There were greater and lesser forms of purges. The Inquisition’s Exterminatus was the most feared. The planet-kill. But it wasn’t the only one. Hive Worlds like my own homeworld conducted purges of the lower levels, the Underhives and the like. Some were targeted, aimed at specific criminal organizations, cartels, and mafias, but some were indiscriminate cullings of any human on a designated level, just to instill a proper sense of fear into them.None of that changed the fact that if you were thinking about a purge, you were admitting that the situation was beyond your control. That you couldn’t control, coerce or cajole someone with force, threats, or bribes. That no economic incentive, no militaristic inevitability, could improve the outcome. Purges were for when a situation was going downhill fast, and there was no other way to stop the bleeding.I don’t blame Margaret Aten for thinking in this kind of way. Not now. Not even back then, at the time! She was just a child, one that had been orphaned twice-over, and had just been shot at by her own people. She was lashing out, nothing more!But that’s the difference between a former schola juve like me, and a Planetary or Sector Governor. When they lashed out, it did far more damage.“Your Grace,” I said loudly, as I stepped into the room that I desperately wanted to flee. “You summoned me?”I hid my fear with the ease of long practice. My expression was firmly military, and I stood up to my full height for the first time in a long while. I needed every single scrap of authority that I could possibly steal in this moment, because no matter if Aten got her purge, or if she was talked out of it by the room of panicked nobles, everyone was going to remember this conversation. I didn’t dare let them remember me as the sniveling coward that I truly was – because if that happened, then I was frakked, and I knew it.
“Cain,” Aten growled, her head locking on me like a carnivore spotting a fellow of the same species. “Get over here.”I stepped up to the holo-table, my long strides eating up the distance. I stopped at the foot of the table, directly opposite to the Archduchess, my presence causing those people previously standing in that position to vacate it.There was, I noticed, an unpleasant amount of symmetry and asymmetry to our appearances. I was tall, pale-skinned, and wearing a military uniform. She was shorter, dark-skinned, and wearing a civilian dress.
Yet both of us stood out from the crowd of civilians by the dint of our hard expressions, and the blood and dirt that speckled our clothing. It was very apparent that we had both undergone the same torment just a short while ago, and perhaps that was why Aten had summoned me. “We’re going to hurt these bastards,” Aten said, staring at me with an intense gaze. “We’re going to break their backs and send a message that they will never forget. Every bar they frequent. Every safehouse. Every single member, down to the affiliates. And these cowards are trying to talk me out of it.”Aten swept her hand out to the side, scowling at the crowd around her. A few of them flinched. Even those that didn’t, those with stoic expressions or the poker faces, I could tell from my own long experience of reading people that they were dismayed at the suggestion. Now, perhaps more than ever, I saw the divide in the Court of Skye. Even here, in her own palace, the Archduchess stood alone at the head of the table. No one stood at her back or by her side. Everyone else was a flunky, a servant, a vassal, whatever, but they were distant from her. Not a single person was within three paces of Margaret Aten, and the looming presence of the fully armed and armored guardsmen along the walls of the room were far too difficult to miss.
She was ready for war… but was it against Free Skye, or her own Court?
Or perhaps both? I thought to myself, swallowing reflexively in my suddenly dry mouth.“Yes, of course we are,” I replied, with the self-confidence of an Imperial Commissar, as if there was no other possibility in the world.Some of the attendees looked at me, and I saw General Ashberry, my commanding officer, narrow his gaze slightly. He was wearing a day-dress uniform, and it looked rumpled, as if he’d been summoned out of his office during working hours. I got a similar look from Freddy, who was standing next to him as a contrast in nearly every way. Taller, more muscular, and wearing the same garish full mess dress uniform that I’d seen him wear at the welcoming ball. But there was no other answer. I couldn’t tell Aten that she was wrong, that we wouldn’t punish Free Skye for this. Not just because it would anger her, and I was so very afraid of doing that in this moment, but because it simply wasn’t true.Free Skye had to be punished for this. If they’d tried this on any Imperial planet, no matter how lenient, the response would have been waves of arrests and public executions, simply to ensure that nobody tried it again. And that’s what Aten wanted, more than anything right now. Not just payback for the attempt on her life, or vengeance for her dead bodyguards… she wanted a permanent deterrent.
Yet Aten’s plan to gain that permanent deterrent wouldn’t work. She didn’t know that. She couldn’t – so young, it was impossible. The Archduchess might have been trained by tutors in her years in the palace, but I knew that in her core, she was still very much that homeless girl from the streets. She was thinking of this terrorist issue as being like a fight between two gangs of petty criminals. A conflict where reputation and face mattered as much as actual effectiveness.You can’t stop street crime. Not permanently, anyway. Children grew into teenagers, and teenagers were rebellious, impudent, and unwise. Shoplifting, pickpocketing, even minor muggings were a side-effect. You couldn’t teach every brat to be good simply because it was better to be moral. A few of them would always roll their eyes and seek out a little spice in their night-life.In arbites terms, what Aten wanted was a show of force. An overwhelming display of might and awe.Sounds good in theory, but the problem is that just like how some children will always test their luck, some criminals will always evade capture – and the more law enforcement they evaded in the process, the more their confidence and ambitions would grow. You’d get a quiet period for a little while, but those survivors would find new blood to fill their ranks, and the cycle would continue, over and over again, until the next Planetary Governor came up with the exact same brilliant plan.
And that was for street gangs. Not hardened terrorists.Of course, I couldn’t say any of that. Margaret Aten had just nearly been killed. She was certainly more stubborn than even Frederick at this very moment! Contradicting or arguing with the Archduchess would achieve nothing. Naturally, this meant that I needed to employ the exact same strategy on her that I had previous used on Freddy-boy.
“How shall we handle the ringleaders for you, Your Grace?” I asked, as if I was one of the arbites, about to lead a daring raid for her. “The ones who gave the orders?”Aten inhaled sharply, and her scowl deepened.“I want them alive,” she said after a moment. “They will stand trial. We’ll punish them according to the law.”There we go, calm down, I thought to myself, cheering up a little. That was a good sign – though it hadn’t actually been the answer I wanted.“Of course,” I agreed with her, nodding. “But I meant how? What kind of raid on them would you like? These men will be more intelligent than their goons. If we slam the doors down on them, there’s a good chance some will escape. Which ones should we prioritize? The most powerful of them, or the most numerous?”I couldn’t just tell Aten that it was impossible to get both. Count Erlen, whoever that was, had already tried and failed to get that across. No, I needed to direct her focus onto a different topic.Which did she want more: the thugs who just believed the wrong things, or the masterminds behind it all? The ones that had personally signed off on her death?Aten hesitated. For a moment, I worried that she would still insist on both, and she’d catch me in my little misdirection.“The ringleaders,” she said, working her jaw like she was chewing on boot-leather. “All of them.”“Of course,” I said again, repeating myself. “If I might make a recommendation, we should hit them before any of the other terrorists. They’ll control the communication networks to the various cells. Take out the coordinators, and the network will become ineffective. But we’ll need to do it all at once. Simultaneous strikes on each and every one of them. If we miss one… that is unacceptable.”Aten nodded, her scowl lightening up as she listened to me.“How many do we have identified, Count?” she asked, turning her head to Count Erlen.“I’m afraid we don’t know all of Free Skye’s leadership,” the Count said, cautiously. “We have many of them. Names, faces, even locations for some. We can get them all for you, my Archduchess, I swear. But we need time to identify them.”“One month,” Aten said, her voice ironclad. “One month from today, you arrest every leader. Earlier, if possible.”Erlen swallowed. I already knew why – one month wasn’t enough time to identify them all. But it was more time than he’d had a few minutes ago. I glanced at Aten, and saw her eyes had narrowed. She’d seen the same thing I had. Too observant, that woman.“Small teams will work best,” I said quickly, before Aten could start tearing strips off the Count. “Too much oversight will give it away. You need a scalpel, not a sledgehammer, Count.”The Count blinked. He looked confused. I was speaking to him, but my words were really meant for Margaret.“How do you know so much about this, Cain?” Aten asked, shifting her gaze back to me. Damn it, I thought, suppressing a wince. I was still standing in front of more than a dozen high-ranking nobility. Hardly the place to talk about it! But I had to answer. It was a direct question. “Experience,” I said shortly, hardening my gaze. How do you fake trauma? Regret? Like all good lies, it was based in the truth. I thought back to my years as the Commissar of the Valhallan 597th. The tunnels under Gravalax was just the first time. I’d done dozens of ‘little favors’ for the Inquisition over the years, and many of the sights I’d seen had haunted me. Things more horrific than any battlefield, experienced at far too close a range.That was what I was telling Aten, in a roundabout way. I was telling her to imitate His Imperial Majesty’s Most Holy Inquisition.
Aten’s expression shifted slowly, finally turning away from the righteous fury that had filled her, and towards a more thoughtful mien as she inspected my face.“Then I’m putting you in charge,” the Archduchess of Skye said. “Find them and drag them in, Hauptmann.”It took nearly every ounce of my willpower to not scream at that.
Good job, Ciaphas, you’ve really stepped in it now! I remember thinking, as I froze my expression completely still, lest Aten detect my true thoughts. Oh, Emperor, I didn’t want that job! I was only trying to convince Aten to back off from declaring Martial Law and pushing every single dissident into an open revolt! But I’d spoken up, and shown off too much of myself. This is what I got for being honest, I swear!
That kind of open street fight was horrible for a MechWarrior, and I wanted no part in it. Yes, Mechs could slaughter poor bloody infantry by the hundreds, but that was best in a field, a desert, a tundra! Open ground, where a magnetic resonance scan could spot the heavy metal of their crew-operated support weapons! Not in a damn city, where every building was concrete, rebar, lead, and a dozen other materials that made it into a blindfolded walk down a maze of knives. And even if the 10th Guards, 10th Regulars, and 17th Skye were a hundred percent eager and supportive for Aten’s plan – and I severely doubted that third Regiment would be – we still had to sleep sometime! We had bases, yes, but how many of the civilian contractors on those bases leaned a little towards Free Skye? How many of them would be forced to side with the terrorists over their fears about Aten’s purge sweeping them up too? Golden Throne, I didn’t want to be bogged down in anti-dissident warfare for the next year, constantly afraid of eating a bullet or stepping past a bomb. That’s ignoring the fact that all the bars would be closed.
That’s the only reason why I had spoken up in the first place: to keep myself safe.But now that I’d opened my damn fool mouth, Aten thought I had the ability to run this kind of coordinated operation, and now she wanted to send me out to hunt lions!
I didn’t know how to do it! The average trooper in the Valhallan 597th might have thought that, but I knew the truth. To the Inquisitor I’d been most acquainted with, I was an accessory. Little more than a purse. I brought bodies and guns when she needed more raw force. I wasn’t a detective like her, able to go undercover and feel out the invisible strings of puppetry behind the gangs and the cults.“I’m not sure that would be the wisest move, Your Grace,” I said, with a careful note in my voice, as I tried desperately not to let my fear slip out, while I lied ferociously to save my own skin. “As much as I would enjoy the responsibility, I am unfortunately too…”I hesitated.
Shit! Everyone was watching me. I couldn’t say the truth, that I was unfortunately too fond of my own innards to do the job. Or that I was too incompetent. “…watched,” I said, fumbling for the word. “Watched?” Aten repeated the word, raising a single eyebrow. “Yes,” I said, scrambling to come up with an excuse for my slip up. I tried to put some regret in my voice, a distant unhappiness that I couldn’t do the job. “They’ve… already tried to kill me twice. Free Skye almost certainly has me under surveillance. They’ll see my comings and goings, and they’ll know that I’m doing some kind of work with the police and the Lyran Intelligence Corps.”“Once,” spoke another voice – not Aten’s, but Frederick’s. He was looking at me with a suspicious look. “The Combine tried to kill you twice, Hauptmann. Despite what the Archduchess said today at the race, we still do not have definitive proof that Free Skye and the Kuritas are working together.”An almost immediate shiver spread through most of the crowd. Aten’s expression darkened, and she glared at Frederick openly, with hate in her eyes. Damn it, this is why I should never get involved with politics. Frederick was running cover for the terrorists, even if he was technically correct. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I hadn’t expected him to directly contradict Margaret Aten to her face! I felt like I was trapped between two Atlases about to brawl.“Twice,” countered a different voice – Ashberry’s. Frederick turned to look at the other General, surprise in his eyes. I couldn’t tell if it was from the disagreement, or who was saying it. Ashberry was hardly the type to get involve in this kind of thing.“Hauptmann Cain got in a firefight on our second day on-planet,” Lieutenant-General Ashberry said, meeting Frederick’s weighty gaze with a steady expression. “Six terrorists tried to kill him in a bar. The battle last week was the second attempt.”“Why didn’t I hear about this?” Frederick snapped. “The after-action report was forwarded to the 10th Guards the next day,” Ashberry replied, unflinching. “Enough,” Aten said, cutting off the brewing argument. Frederick shot her a heated look, but Ashberry looked unruffled. “You’ve got a point, Hauptmann. I want these bastards. I want them bad. But… I won’t let them slip away that easy, and if your presence will risk tipping them off, then so be it.”She glanced at Freddy, an unspoken challenge in her experience. Frederick stiffened, rising almost unconsciously to his full height, looming over the smaller woman. Aten was unbowed. She stared at Freddy for ten seconds, long enough to send her message, and then turned back to look at me.“Your… ‘experience’ would still be useful, however,” the Archduchess said, putting far more emphasis on the word than I had. “The Lyran Intelligence Corps will be in touch with you, as will Count Erlen of the New Glasgow Police Department. While I’m sure they’re both highly qualified for the task,” – she didn’t sound so sure to me, but it was subtle enough that others might not have noticed – “I will appreciate it if you would offer them your perspective.”
I perked up almost instantly. A consulting role as an advisor? That was the greatest of all responsibilities – because it was the easiest! All you had to do was chip in some vague advice every now and then, and you’d get plenty of glory if you were right… and none of the blame if you were wrong.“But of course, Your Grace,” I replied, nodding confidently on the outside.I kept my body-language deferential and polite, trying my best to seem like I was grateful for the opportunity to help.
Internally, I danced a jig at escaping yet another near-certain suicide mission.