“And then Asher Dales will be unprotected,” Tanya said. Her voice was very quiet, as if she didn’t fully trust the privacy generator. “We need to get the ships in place before it’s too late.”
“We will,” William assured her. “We’ll make sure of it.”
He took one last look around the destroyer as they made their way to the airlock. The dealer might be a sleazebag, but he knew his ships. It wouldn’t take long to get the destroyer ready for space, once money had changed hands and she had a crew. They could reach Asher Dales in three weeks, if they pushed the drives hard . . .
“We might even be able to start sharing information with other worlds,” he added thoughtfully. “The more pirates we can kill, the better.”
“More will come,” Tanya said.
William shook his head. “Pirates are basically cowards,” he said. “They don’t want to risk their ships and crew when it can be avoided. You just have to take out a few of them to make the others look elsewhere.”
And if someone had made it clear to the Theocracy that they couldn’t win the war, he added privately, the entire war might never have been fought.
CHAPTER FOUR
AHURA MAZDA
Kat had seen devastation before. She’d watched, helplessly, as enemy starships bombarded entire planets; she’d stared in horror as Hebrides had been turned into a radioactive wasteland. And yet, the crater in the ground where Government House had been was somehow worse. The hopes and dreams of an entire planet had died with Admiral Junayd.
She looked at General Winters, trying to keep her feelings under control. “There was a forcefield.”
Winters looked grim. “The blast went off inside the forcefield,” he said. “The post-battle assessment teams are already looking at the evidence, but it seems to me as though the forcefield actually trapped the blast and made matters worse.”
“Fuck,” Kat said. She could smell death on the air. “How did they even get a bomb past the security sensors?”
“I don’t know,” Winters said. “But I can guess.”
Kat could guess too. Treason. Admiral Junayd had insisted on building up his own security forces as quickly as possible, pointing out that they’d work better with the local population than the Commonwealth Marines. Kat had reluctantly backed him, knowing that there would come a time, sooner rather than later, when the Commonwealth would have to hand the planet over to the provisional government. But all it took was a single traitor in a position of power to set the effort back years. It wouldn’t even have to be a high-ranking traitor. A lone man in command of the sensors could let a bomb into the compound with minimal effort.
And he probably died in the blast, Kat thought. Did he even know what he was smuggling in?
She gritted her teeth as the wind blew stronger. The recruits had been tested—repeatedly—under lie detectors, and none of them had been working for the insurgents . . . not directly. But they hadn’t been angels either. Admiral Junayd had been willing to accept a certain level of moral flexibility in exchange for loyalty. The troops hadn’t committed atrocities on a regular basis, thankfully, but they’d had no qualms about smuggling or shaking prisoners down for funds. One of the smugglers had probably thought he was slipping drugs into Government House. This time, he’d been wrong.
Her heart clenched, just for a second. She’d never liked Admiral Junayd, and she hadn’t wanted to trust him, but she’d come to believe that he meant well . . . that he had meant well for his people. There had been a certain amount of personal enrichment in there too. ONI had kept careful track of how Admiral Junayd had been rigging the provisional government to support his primacy, but by and large, he’d done a decent job. And he hadn’t joined the factions that blamed the Commonwealth for the chaos.
He would be missed.
She allowed her eyes to sweep the blast zone as the recovery crews went to work, pulling out bodies and stacking them like cordwood by the side of the road. Marines followed, their eyes sweeping the streets for signs of trouble. The entire area had gone into lockdown, with the civilian population warned to stay inside and off the streets, but Kat was grimly aware that they could still be attacked at any moment. Captain Akbar Rosslyn, the commander of her close-protection detail, had made that very clear to her. If there was anyone on the planet more hated than Admiral Junayd, it was Kat. The insurgents would spend their men like water if there was a chance of killing her.
Perhaps we should use me as bait, Kat thought morbidly.
She snorted at the thought, then turned her attention to the bodies. There were fewer than she’d expected, unsurprisingly. The blast would have destroyed the forcefield generator, of course, but there would have been a microsecond delay between the generator’s destruction and the forcefield actually failing. Winters had been right. The blast would have been trapped, with nowhere to go. It was a minor miracle that so many bodies had survived intact. Admiral Junayd’s corpse might never be recovered.
Winters checked his datapad. “Intelligence states that no less than seventeen groups have already claimed responsibility for the blast,” he said. “So far, no actual confirmation.”
Kat wasn’t surprised. “Perhaps they’ll go to war over it,” she said. The insurgent factions hated each other almost as much as they hated the occupiers. She sometimes thought that the only thing keeping them from actually winning was that they spent half their time trying to take out their rivals instead of the common foe. “Do we have any solid leads?”
“Not yet,” Winters said. “Perhaps not ever.”
Kat nodded, sourly. In one sense, it simply didn’t matter. The damage had been done. Government House was gone, the heart of the provisional government had been wiped out . . . and the occupiers had been
