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Chapter 20


“Strength only grows from resistance, whether through the crush of gravity or the clash of arms.”


Legacy Mandate by Emperor Yung I


The Marines moved up the companionway, their short-barreled raid carbines in high-ready, their grab-boots skating along the deck in a liquid shuffle. They reached the hatch, and four weapons trained upon its metal stillness. One Marine paused, kicking his leg sharply upward, releasing his lower grab-boot from the deck. In zero gravity his momentum carried him firmly against the ceiling where he clicked into place, pivoting smoothly to face the same hatch.

A second Marine slapped power leads in place, and the corporal barked, “Pop it!”

The door snapped back under their suit-powered overboost, and four weapon-mounted floods illuminated a slice of the exposed compartment with multiple wavelengths of the visible and invisible spectrum.

The corporal triggered one of his UI presets, and all four floods went instantly dark. Without a word, two Marines launched through the door like coiled springs, their upward trajectories bisecting in the darkness. They each executed a tight somersault, their grab-boots sticking the ceiling at almost the same moment. Their floods popped as one, illuminating the two blind corners in a single instant.

Major Kosh Mahdi stepped into the exercise with Sergeant Kabir lumbering at his side. “What do you think, Sergeant?” Major Mahdi inquired in a rhetorical tone.

The two Marines on the ceiling smoothly threw a leg and flipped to the floor, assembling with the other two members of the fire team.

“Major, I think these hard-hitting strikers’d kill the shit out of teddy bears and kittens.”

“I agree,” Major Mahdi said. “Corporal, I realize our current opponents are merely human, but some of these misguided fools were once Marines. What are they now, Corporal?”

“Just targets, sir.”

Major Mahdi smiled. “Good answer. Just targets. Just practice for real opponents.”

If Major Kosh Mahdi possessed an abiding flaw, it was racism; racism in the truest sense of the word. His pro-human chauvinism knew no bounds. No day passed without some reflection upon humanity’s old enemy, the Slaggers, now supposedly exterminated. He willingly stoked these fires, replaying old vidstreams.… There were his great-grandparents, so young, so full of life…their bones, and the substance of a billion other humans now comprised a cloud of ash on a blasted, lifeless planet. The Slaggers were gone, maybe, but someone else would surely come along. Maybe they already had. Who knew what the Shapers really wanted? Major Kosh Mahdi of the Imperial Marines certainly did not trust them.

“Alright, Corporal, keep at it. You’ll do.”

The corporal visibly expanded at the modest praise. Major Mahdi, despite any illiberal defects in character, found great favor among the ranks. When the Major put together an understrength platoon for a nondescript float on a nothing vessel, candidates lined his hall. They just knew it had to be something good, something top secret. Every member of his team held certificates from at least two advanced courses, and every member achieved top marks in marksmanship and zero-grav. A disproportionate percentage were also battledress rated, their own suits secured in Tanager’s hold.

Kosh Mahdi thought it a waste of good Marines. Gods damned Zanka!

Major Mahdi and Sergeant Kabir made their way back through the tight quarters of Marine country, moving from the small area they used for zero-grav clearing exercises, to the equally tiny area jammed with Marines in heavy-grav physical training.

“We’ve got twenty, thirty days, maybe,” Major Mahdi rumbled. “This lot be in fighting shape by then?”

“You see them, sir. They’re in shape now. Shape for what, though?” The gravity steadily increased upon them as they moved past the laboring, sweating squad, moving through their punishing exercises.

Major Mahdi frowned, looking down at the deck as they walked on. They stopped beside a small cargo bay. Two designated marksmen sprawled on the deck nearby, both staring fixedly through the optics on their long mass-driver rifles, locked upon a blank bulkhead, lost in a VR simulation.

“Mover! Sixteen hundred, just off the clock tower. You got ’im, Wiley?” one marksman said. The second marksman pressed the trigger; his rifle bucked with a pneumatic hiss.

“Got ’im!”

“Drones up, scanning.”

“I see them.”

Major Mahdi glanced at the marksmen lost in their simulated battle. “It remains to be seen, Sergeant. Have you met the boat captain, yet?”

Sergeant Kabir internally checked at the apparent non sequitur. “Not yet, sir. Met the captain’s cox’n. She’s a distant relative of the captain. Says he’s a former ground-pound doggie.”

Mahdi nodded, still frowning. “So I’ve heard.”

“’Course, everyone knows he’s from that old Family.”

“Yes.”

“And everyone knows he shamed Admiral Nifesh,” Sergeant Kabir murmured.

“That is the rumor,” Mahdi said, looking absently at the two marksmen still locked in simulated battle.

“Wasn’t that Nifesh bunch old oath kin with the Mahdi House, back in the day?”

Major Mahdi’s eyes snapped from the marksmen and focused on Sergeant Kabir, one massive heavyworld officer to a heavyworld sergeant. Neither man spoke for a protracted second.

“We’ll be working up a tactical solution, Sergeant. Could we take down a starship without disabling the ship Intelligence first?” Due to the Thinking Machine Protocols, a Fleet Intelligence had little actual power to operate any function in a starship aside from the lights and artificial gravity, but that was enough to discomfit most attackers. In simulations, boarding Marines needed numbers to overcome the tactical disadvantages of an active Intelligence. On Tanager the Marines were too few to comfortably contemplate such a thing.

Sergeant Kabir flicked a glance at the marksmen still absorbed in conflict. “It is an interesting question, sir.” A silence stretched between them, covered by the marksmen’s chatter beside them, and the clatter and roar of the PT squad not far behind.

“Sergeant,” Mahdi asked at last, his voice a low rumble, “is this little war we have a good thing or a bad thing?”

Sergeant Kabir cringed. “I—sir? I mean…a rebellion against the Emperor…?” The sergeant glanced upward: the ship Intelligence heard all.

Major Mahdi placed a thick hand on Sergeant Kabir’s shoulder. “As a loyal Vested Citizen, is this war good or bad?”

“Bad, sir. That’s why we fight.”

Major Mahdi stared at Sergeant Kabir, through him, musing. “A blade is not tempered by silken pillows, Sergeant. It takes fire, harsh blows, pressure.” He patted the sergeant’s shoulder. “This little war will end, and we—we—will be stronger for it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Put that tactical solution together, then.”

“I’ll get something together, sir.”

“Good…good.” Major Mahdi set off again with Sergeant Kabir trailing, pondering precisely who the major meant by “we.” Who would be stronger? The Marines? The Imperium? Heavyworlders? Humanity?


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