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Chapter 26


“Regain what you may, for I will meet you…”


Legacy Mandate by Emperor Yung I


Winter Yung, Imperial Consul to Battersea, Imperial agent and connoisseur of hedonism, stepped out of her armored skimcar and surveyed the surrounding verdant fields with disdain. She really held little right to complain about the setting, since she selected the meeting location, but that did not stop her. Bess Sinclair-Maru’s strident complaints made this meeting necessary, and Winter needed no reason to blame others for her discomfort at any time, regardless.

When the two Sinclair-Maru skimcars slid into the field a short distance away, Winter registered a mild degree of surprise. All of Imperial High Society noticed the Sinclair-Maru’s recent defensive posture, the constant presence of Family security teams around Sinclair-Maru properties and personnel. And, honestly, this played directly to Winter’s benefit. More than anything else Winter had arranged, this convinced everyone that the Sinclair-Maru stood on the inside of some great, secretive plot. For Bess to travel now with only a single escort vehicle and a few bodyguards seemed reckless under the current Sinclair-Maru mood.

Winter clicked her sword into place and stepped out from the protective cordon of her own bodyguards—her visible bodyguards. Each step provoked a twinge of delicious soreness, and for a pleasant moment her mind flashed upon her previous evening. No servant of the Emperor was more enthusiastic in extracting information from debased members of the quasi-nobility than Winter Yung. With the right subject, Winter might extract information for pleasurable hours.

The faint smile that touched Winter’s lips faded as she beheld the stolid, brown form of Bess Sinclair-Maru. Though they had been classmates decades before, the un-regenerated marks of age on Bess’s features immediately cooled Winter’s fires. Bess Sinclair-Maru was not the right sort of subject for Winter’s vigorous extraction methods.

“Dame Sinclair-Maru,” Winter greeted while still some distance apart, “I take it I must endure a fresh string of complaints.”

“Consul,” Bess said, drawing closer, leaving her own security spreading out a stone’s throw behind her, “so good to see you in person again.”

“Indeed. So no complaints, Bess?”

Bess continued walking until they stood just beyond arm’s reach. Winter’s analytics quested across Bess’s visible features, the pupils of her eyes, the muted beat of her pulse at her throat. They divined nothing clear. “Questions, Consul,” Bess said. “We seek some hint of a path through this maze of game-playing.”

Winter shook her head slowly. “Subtlety, always lacking in your Family, Bess. This never changes.”

“We also lack duplicity.”

Winter’s irritation flared. “Those who lose at the game are the only ones decrying the rules. The Imperium does not compose itself to your whims, Bess, or your anachronism. So adapt, or fade away.”

Now Winter’s analytics detected the flash of Bess’s anger. “What do you want from us? Is it just the destruction of the Sinclair-Maru? What?”

“Such melodrama… Don’t flatter yourself, Bess. Until I made you interesting again no one of any importance spared a thought for the history-book family on their backwater planet.” Winter suddenly felt a hint of uncertainty as she saw the anger vanish from Bess’s face rather than grow as she had expected.

“So you truly are not engineering this?”

The analytics jangled. Winter tensed.

“Engineering what, Bess?”

“Give us a list with one hand, take our contracts with the other?”

Something did not add up between the emotions Bess contained and the words that she spoke. Winter waved a dismissive hand. “No destruction. Nothing nearly so dire. I give, another faction takes. Even you should know it works this way.”

“And the encroachment by House Barabas upon our manor?” Bess asked, her face a shell concealing something.

Winter’s analytics ran wild, catching hints of fear, indignation, and just a flash of something tagged alternately as satisfaction and treachery. “Barabas?” Winter said, feeling forces moving beyond her framework, shaking her certainty. Information on Barabas spooled through her UI. “Encroaching how?”

Bess measured Winter in her gaze. “A faction that even you do not know? I am not sure if that is a mark for them, or a mark against you.”

Winter shook her head, sifting enough data on Barabas to compose an informed sentence. “So Barabas joins a spin-ward Trade combine and you come crying that the world is ending?”

Bess’s mouth thinned and Winter did not require the analytic flag to recognize contempt as Bess spoke, “Your incompetence may have killed us both. But I am fool enough to feel glad you aren’t the one pulling the strings…for the sake of our school-room days.”

Winter’s reflexive rage stumbled, her UI filling with a sudden string of priority alerts. Her analytics played across Bess’s face, screaming danger. “It’s not about Trade, Consul. Barabas moves against us the old-fashioned way.…

“What have you done?” Winter whispered, the shower of alerts and priorities exploding, her eyes flickering through the UI inputs. Far above her, the IMS Fury rapid-fired alarmed messages, requesting clearance to launch Marines, or to fire on approaching vehicles, or do something. Analytics argued with Winter’s knee-jerk impression of a Sinclair-Maru betrayal. From the chaos of alerts and flags, Winter suddenly pieced together a stream of clarity. “You’re bait.”

Winter’s security team received many of the same alerts. Weapons filled hands, some covering the Sinclair-Maru bodyguards who simply sat down in the field and crossed their arms. An autocannon unfolded from Winter’s skimcar and began tracking something invisibly distant.

“We will share in this, together, Winter,” Bess said. “My enemies will now be your enemies.”

The autocannon roared, blazing away at incoming missiles, still invisible in the blue sky. Winter blanket-affirmed the string of UI queries: YES, LAUNCH MARINES; YES, INTERDICTION FIRE; YES, YES, YES!

Winter’s bodyguards ran toward her, then tumbled as the ground leaped beneath them. Earth showered red-brown clods over Winter and Bess, white streaks crossed the sky over their sprawled forms, and small-arms fire erupted.

Winter wiped her eyes clear, and for a moment she lay nearly face-to-face with Bess, the thunder around them creating a pocket of surreal space.

“Dying…dying here, damn you,” Winter seemed to whisper, but Bess heard, despite the cacophony of explosions.

“No!” Bess growled, rolling. “You stay alive.” She threw herself over Winter as the skimcar exploded.

The part of Winter’s mind that had maintained a nugget of sanity through all these years calmly observed everything as it unfolded now. It dryly recognized the strength of Bess Sinclair-Maru’s arms locked around her, evidence of all the high-gravity training. It noted Bess’s body jerking from multiple impacts, and recognized the sudden heat of her activating body shield, deflecting projectiles still moving with sufficient velocity through Bess. The warm wetness of blood flowing from Bess Sinclair-Maru was an abstraction that poured over Winter. The flowering of Marine reentry spikes in the sky above seemed like ripples in blue water.

Another explosion struck nearby, its force seeming to stomp Winter into the ground beneath Bess’s shattered body for a moment before rag-dolling them both through the air. Winter thumped down without pain, still feeling strangely conscious of countless obscure details.

After a deafened moment, Winter’s lungs restarted, as Marines in full battledress armor dropped from the sky all around her. Winter coughed, struggling to sit up. Streaks still crossed the sky as Fury continued showering kinetic accelerators on distant targets, and armored Marines plummeted down around her.

A cluster of battledress Marines surrounded Winter, facing outward, their weapons covering every vector. One of the Sinclair-Maru bodyguards stirred, trying to sit up, and a Marine’s carbine leveled.

“No,” Winter said, coughing. “Give them aid.”

“Yes, Consul,” the Marine lieutenant said, his voice crackling from the flat alloy of his battledress helmet.

As the Marines moved, Winter stood unsteadily to her feet and turned slowly about. The skimcars smoldered in heaps, the field wore a dozen small craters, scars stabbed into the lush green. Most of the bodyguards lay bleeding or scattered in pieces. Only now did Winter recognize the significance of the Sinclair-Maru retinue all being older: all were selected for a one-way mission, meant to entice their House enemies into the open. Perhaps they died satisfied.

Winter’s gaze traveled to the crumpled, shattered figure of Bess Sinclair-Maru as a Marine medico attached med unit leads to Bess, but it appeared an exercise in futility. Imperial Security long believed the Sinclair-Maru possessed a coveted Shaper body shield, like the one radiating warmth on Winter’s back, but it appeared this was not true, and Bess formed the dying proof of this.

Gods damn you, Bess! Winter’s anger and resentment boiled toward her former classmate, but the soft breeze blew, cooling the blood that covered Winter…Bess’s blood.

Knowing full well that Bess manipulated and endangered her, even raging at Bess, Winter still felt the pressure of that last embrace. She felt each of the impacts that ripped through the body of her old classmate. She heard each pained exhalation right in her ear, a terrible intimacy.

“Consul,” a Marine’s metallic voice spoke beside Winter, “the attackers’ drones and vehicles are all down. Our strikecraft drops into the well now. We can lift you to Fury shortly.”

Lift her to Fury. To fury. To fury.

Winter smeared blood from her face. “I want to know what House was behind this,” Winter said, staring sightlessly. “Start with Barabas. Sift the wreckage. Sift the Nets. Get me someone alive.”

“Yes, Consul.”

Even as that dry, sane part of Winter’s mind reminded her that this was all part of the Sinclair-Maru manipulation, that they, the Sinclair-Maru, should be the target of her wrath, she heard Bess Sinclair-Maru’s breath in her ear. She heard the pain in each impact. For that moment, as weapons had thundered and shrapnel flew, Winter had felt sheltered. For this first time in her life, embraced by her dying classmate, Winter had felt loved.

Irrational as it may be, Winter felt the wrath boiling up.

“Lift me to Fury.”


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Framed