We found the finest officer’s mess on Gold Deck and ate like kings. Everything was fresh and delicious. I had smoked salmon on rice, a roast beef sandwich, a bowl of spaghetti and two beers. Galina ate a fancy salad.

  We got to talking afterward, and she admitted she’d been quite impressed by the vids of us playing whack-a-mole with the dogmen and the Mogwa. Everyone aboard the ship by now had heard about it, as we’d gone ahead and posted our recordings using a hacked account.

  The two of us were hitting it off pretty good, in fact, when a certain professional cock-blocker named Winslade came to find me.

  “Centurion McGill? What are you doing on Gold Deck?”

  “He’s having dinner with me,” Galina told him. She was an imperator, and she outranked old Winslade.

  He flashed her a scowl of disapproval. “Imperator, I’d appreciate it if you would allow me to discipline lower ranked officers in my own legion as I see fit. This man was confined to quarters. He’s under investigation for disrupting diplomatic protocol with the Mogwa.”

  “Disrupting it? I thought he was our liaison with respect to joint operations.”

  Winslade appeared smug. “That is no longer the case. We took the recordings, which McGill here insisted on making public. Sateekas took a grim view of his actions and rescinded McGill’s absurd post.”

  I stood up, shocked. “You did what?”

  Winslade turned in my direction. We had a face-off right there in the restaurant, and I knew it wasn’t going to go well for Winslade if I got too riled up.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Did you think I was going to allow all this insubordination? You’re a constant troublemaker. From now on, professional diplomats from the xenology team will handle our interactions with Sateekas.”

  “They’ll screw it all up! They’ve got no idea how to talk to a Mogwa.”

  Winslade shrugged. “You had the job, but you blew it. You just couldn’t keep from having a laugh, could you?”

  Galina cleared her throat. We both glanced at her. “Who made this decision, Winslade?”

  “Praetor Drusus himself, after I explained what McGill did. He was horrified.”

  “Aw, come on,” I said. “It was really funny.”

  “Sit down, James,” Galina told me. “Winslade, you’re dismissed.”

  With a sly smile tossed in my direction, he walked away. I flipped him off under the table.

  Galina watched me. “Are you happy now? We’ve got fools from Xenology doing our diplomacy. How long will it be before Sateekas flays one of them alive?”

  “Not long, I suppose. I guess Winslade is right. I went too far. But he shouldn’t have dressed me up as a primus and sent me and my boys over there in the first place. The Mogwa demanded that high-ranked officers participate. We did all the dying, so we felt like playing a few tricks of our own.”

  Galina nodded. “Mistakes were made all around. Legion Varus is a disorganized mob of people. None of us are qualified to handle sensitive diplomatic interactions. Everyone should have known better. I’m just glad Drusus is in operational command of this mess, rather than me.”

  I thought about that, and I realized she seemed unusually calm. I guess she could be pretty chill when disasters couldn’t be traced back to her desk.

  The rest of the night went very smoothly from my point of view. I ended up spending the evening in her apartments, and it was a nice change of pace.

  -20-

  After losing my status as a liaison, I felt relieved. It wasn’t easy for a shiftless scoundrel like myself to hold an important job—unless the job involved killing someone or stealing something.

  Talking nice for a living? That kind of job wasn’t for me, at least not long term.

  Five long months went by. We spent the time training, killing each other, screwing each other and getting into trouble. I was flogged twice, and once I was left for dead nine whole days. All in all, I had myself a pretty good time.

  One day in what people back home would have called February, we finally arrived at our destination. The funny thing was, the exact moment was kind of a secret. Even the Mogwa seemed uncertain until a few hours before the big arrival happened.

  “This is weird,” Leeson kept saying. “I’ve never been this far from home. How do the techs even know where the hell we are?”

  I pointed at Natasha and gave her the nod. She was our resident brainiac. I figured she could do the briefing herself.

  “Well… it’s kind of hard to explain. I’ll try, however. When we go into a warp field, we’re blinded.”

  “I get that,” Leeson said, crossing his arms. “The only thing we can do to detect our whereabouts is measure nearby gravitational forces.”

  “Right. But you see, that’s not an exact science. There’s a lot of astrophysics and calculus involved. We’re traveling faster than the speed of light, and we’re doing so into regions we’ve never visited. Everything we know about the Mid-Zone is thousands of years old.”

  “Uh…” I said. “How can that be? We can see the whole Milky Way galaxy from Earth, right?”

  “No,” she said, bringing up some star charts. A holographic vision of our local galaxy appeared with billions of stars spinning in space above us. She reached up and manipulated the image. Like a god on a stormy mountain, Natasha reached toward the Core Systems, a massive spheroid of stars at the center of the whole thing. “This is where Earth is—relative to the Core.”

  She touched the map, and she made a green dot blink. That was Earth, two thirds of the way out from the center.

  “From our point of view, there’s a zone of stars we know nothing about. These are on the opposite side of the Core. The stellar density in the Core is so great, we can’t see through it from Earth.”

  “Oh… keep going.”

  “Okay,” she said, lighting up the Mid-Zone again. It was a soft blue band between Earth and the Core. “The problem we’re having now is navigational. We’ve flown so far from home that the reality of these stars, of their real positions, isn’t the same as what we’ve seen from Earth.”

  “Huh?” Leeson asked. “How the hell does that work?”

  “I’m trying to explain. You see, the speed of light is relatively slow on this grand scale. We’ve only seen these stars as they were thousands of years ago. Some have moved. Some may have gone nova. Some might be affected by dark objects, like black holes, and end up moving somewhere unexpected.”

  “Oh… I get it,” Leeson said.

  “Well then, explain it to me,” I asked.

  “It’s like this, we’ve been looking into the past with our telescopes. If you go out a thousand lightyears to examine a planet you’ve been looking at, that planet will be a thousand years in time further on. Since we’re trying to navigate by gravity, well, we might make mistakes. Our guesses as to where stuff should be a thousand years from when we last saw them might be off.”

  Natasha pointed a finger at him. “That’s exactly right. We’ve been looking into the past since Galileo first invented the telescope. Until now, we’ve never really flown out here to record definite information. We’ve been working with old images and mathematical models.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, pointing to the Mid-Zone. “Where are we headed? Best guess.”

  Natasha hemmed and hawed, but she finally isolated a set of about fifty stars in a ball that she figured held our target.

  “Cagey Mogwa,” I complained. “They love to be secretive. They don’t even want to tell us where we’re headed. Is it a hot planet or a cold one? You’d think they’d give us a clue.”

  “Those who control us always have secrets,” Leeson said in the tone of a man imparting a great wisdom. Maybe he was.

  “Okay, so how long until we arrive, and how far off might we be from our target?” I asked, turning back to Natasha.

  “I don’t know… but I’d say it’ll be less than a week before we get there. I know the techs are being asked to do regular location math now. Several times a day. They’re guesstimating like mad.”

  “We should just come out of warp, take a quick peek, then go back in,” Leeson said. “This business of plowing our way all the way to the target star is dangerous and plain nuts.”

  I pointed a finger at him. “There must be a reason why they’re doing it. I think they expect a hot arrival.”

  He looked startled. “Enemy ships?”

  “Has to be. Why else take these risks? There has to be a reason.”

  “Aw, damn. I hate space battles.”

  Leeson wasn’t alone in that sentiment. We were ground-pounders. When ships blasted away at each other, we were helpless cargo.

  We broke up the meeting about an hour later, and I went back to my quarters to freshen up. Galina and I had a date planned this evening, and I didn’t want to be late. I was already hoping the date would come with some fringe benefits later on tonight.

  As it turned out, I never made it to her door to knock and pick her up. The first clue I had that something was wrong came in the form of a lurching gut-punch. The ship’s internal gravity generators had all been switched off then on again.

  I knew enough to throw my hands in front of my face. That was all I had time to do.

  Slam! I did a facer on the deck. They’d done something to Dominus, something sudden and dirty. We’d either been hit, or we’d performed a hard turn in space.

  When I was lifted up again, sent flying into the air and slammed against the starboard wall, I knew it was the latter of the two options. We were maneuvering under emergency power.

  Belatedly, a half-dozen klaxons and spinning lights began to play. It would have been nice to have a warning before the fireworks began—but then again, maybe the fleet pukes were as surprised as I was.

  Less experienced crewmen and soldiers climbed awkwardly to their feet when the violent motion stopped—but not me. This wasn’t my first rodeo.

  “Everyone! Stay down on the deck! Crawl!”

  The legionnaires within earshot did as I’d ordered. A few of the fleet pukes did too—but not all of them. Some gave me a sneer and began to trot toward their battle stations.

  Slam!

  We spun around again. A few more people did facers, and one ensign didn’t get up. She flopped over the deck like a ragdoll.

  We scrambled on all fours after that, crawling over the walls half the time, to get to a safe spot. Soon, the all-clear was sounded, and a familiar voice boomed over the ship’s public address system.

  “All hands,” Captain Merton said, “we’ve arrived at our target world. We’re coming out of warp in a hostile situation. Proceed to your battle stations.”

  My mind was full of questions. Why hadn’t we gotten an earlier warning? Why had we done those sudden, vicious maneuvers?

  But there were no easy answers coming. There was no time for explanations. As combat troops we had one duty, possibly two, to attend to. One job was to cover all the ship’s vital systems, in case there was a boarding attempt. The second was to make ready to land on the target world, if we were within range. Accordingly, I rushed to my module and marshalled my troops. We scrambled to pull on combat gear and arm ourselves at the nearest armory.

  I barely knew what was happening, but I was sure of one thing: This war had just become real.

  -21-

  Once I’d reached my module, I found my troops were already hopping. Everyone was shrugging on gear, yelling at each other and checking weapons. We’d been armed since earlier this week, but we didn’t have a full load-out of supplies and ammo.

  “McGill?”

  My tapper was talking to me. It was Primus Graves.

  “Sir?”

  “Get your unit to Red Deck. You’re dropping on the target if we can clear a path.”

  “Uh… got it, sir. But… why should we have to clear a path? What’s in the way?”

  “That doesn’t matter to a ground-pounder. Follow orders.”

  That was it, he was gone. I scrambled my troops as fast as we could, racing down the passages following blinking arrows under our feet to Red Deck. The arrows were sophisticated these days, even telling us to halt and wait when another unit was charging by. They were like a smart traffic-control system.

  When we got to the chaos and noise that was Red Deck, we were packed onto a lifter. Excited and uncertain as to what we faced, we chattered and checked our gear yet again.

  A half hour passed—but nothing happened other than a few hard swerves to port or starboard. Dominus was clearly on approach—going somewhere and avoiding something.

  At last, I got tired of waiting. I summoned Natasha.

  She arrived and Leeson was edged out of his seat at my side. She had a sheepish look on her face.

  “I know what you’re going to say, James… ” she said, not meeting my eye.

  This came as no surprise. I’d often asked her to hack stuff for me, to find out what they knew up on Gold Deck. I naturally assumed she’d figured a way into the feeds... She lifted her tapper and flicked a feed to mine.

  “You already hacked the bridge?” I asked, impressed. “Did you know I was going to ask you?”

  “No, I just couldn’t stand the suspense myself.”

  Laughing and shaking my head, I examined what she’d captured. It was an eyeful.

  A reddish planet, kind of like a big Mars but with some silvery oceans dotting the land, came into view. Two things besides the planet itself I found impressive.

  First off was the big-ass dome on one side of the planet. It was huge and shimmery. It had to reach all the way up to the clouds. Underneath this dome was a massive city. The city was so big it covered a lot of the world. If I had to guess, I’d say it was about as big as my beloved Georgia Sector back home.

  “Wow… that’s one big town. That dome, too… it’s…”

  I trailed off, frowning. “What do I see there? What are those sparklers above the big city?”

  “Those aren’t sparklers, James. They’re falling debris.”

  Frowning, I squinted. The screen was small and the images were odd. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

  “I don’t get it. What am I looking at?”

  Natasha leaned closer. I immediately liked her smell. It wasn’t perfumey, it was light and clean, with a hint of hot nervousness underneath.

  “There are ships bombing the dome. They’re sieging the only city on the planet.”

  “Oh… I get it. Sateekas said the bears from Rigel were out here. Is that who we’re facing?”

  “They don’t know for sure yet.”

  “Why are we sitting on this lifter, anyways?” I demanded, coming to the next obvious question. “There’s no way we can land on a planet that’s under bombardment.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they plan to attack and drive the raiders away, then land. I just don’t know.”

  I stared at the feed for a few minutes more. It looked like our fleet was organized now and making a serious approach. We were obviously on an attack vector.

  That said, the enemy ships weren’t paying any attention. They just kept bombing the big city, as if they couldn’t even see us. It was kind of weird.

  “Are we in stealth or something?” I asked Natasha. “What are the people on the bridge saying?”

  She looked at her boots. “I don’t know.”

  “Liar. Hook me up.”

  She sighed and relayed an audio feed to my helmet.

  “…the enemy force still isn’t withdrawing,” said a voice. I recognized it as Captain Merton. “The Mogwa are gleeful. They’re racing ahead with their lone battlecruiser. I don’t like it.”

  “Shall we maintain our formation, sir?” asked a fleet flunky.

  “Drop our engine output by ten percent. We’ll fall back a little. After all, we’re flying a transport here, not a battlewagon.”

  “Engines dropping ten percent.”

  I looked at Natasha. “Old Merton is cagey. He smells a trap—but why?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I’ve only got audio feed. But as I understand it, all they can see is a squadron of enemy tugboats. They’re unarmed.”

  “How are they bombing the city dome, then?”

  “They seemed to be dragging asteroids to the planet and dropping them down into the atmosphere.”

  Thinking that over, I was impressed. “That might be all they have—a few tugboats? We’ll smash them.”

  Natasha shrugged. “That’s what Sateekas seems to believe. He’s rushing in to destroy them.”

  Thinking things over, I frowned. I wasn’t totally getting it. Sure, it made sense that a planet with no fleet to protect them could be abused by nothing more than a few tugboats. But then, on the other hand, those same tugs should be running the moment they spotted warships on approach. It was really the behavior of the tugboats that didn’t make any sense.

  With a decisive finger, I moved to turn off the feed. This whole thing wasn’t my problem. It was fleet business. In my experience such things might take hours to play out. It was time to consider catching a nap while I could.

  My finger hovered over my tapper, but I hesitated. Sighing, I decided to doze while I let it play. Maybe something interesting would happen.

  A few minutes later, Natasha jostled me. My eyes snapped awake.

  “James!” she hissed. “James—there are ships. More ships!”

  I lifted my tapper into view again. We were a lot closer to the Mars-like planet now. It was unmistakable. Finally, at long last, the tugboats were goosing their tiny jets. They were accelerating away from us—but it was too late for that. We were almost on top of them.

  “Looks like we’ve caught these bastards red-handed.”

  “No, no,” Natasha said, impatiently. “Look over here—at the horizon!”

  I squinted, and I thought I saw some more plumes. Exhaust trails? They were coming from the far side of the planet.

  “Uh-oh…”

  It turned out to be the understatement of the campaign. A dozen large warships were now flying around into view. Already, Dominus and the rest of Earth’s fleet was coming about, bringing their broadsides to bear.