And he has a dozen implants, Zaskar thought, studying the report from the security scan. The visitor was practically a cyborg. And that means he’s from . . . ?
“Please, be seated,” Zaskar said. He kept his voice polite. Advanced implants meant that their guest was from one of the major powers. The Commonwealth was right out, of course, but there were others. Some of them might even see advantage in backing his fleet. “I’m Admiral Zaskar, commander of this fleet.”
“A pleasure,” the man said. He inclined his head in a formal bow. “I’m Simon Askew.”
“A pleasure,” Zaskar echoed. The name meant nothing to him, but he rather suspected it wasn’t the man’s real name. “You seem to have come looking for us.”
“Correct,” Askew said. He leaned forward. “My . . . superiors would like to offer you a certain degree of support in your operations.”
“Indeed?” Zaskar wasn’t sure whether he believed it or not. Keeping his fleet going would require an immense investment. “And the price would be?”
“We want you to keep the Commonwealth busy,” Askew said. “It is in our interests to see them get bogged down.”
“Is it now?” Zaskar frowned. “And who would be interested in seeing them bogged down?”
“My superiors wish to remain unnamed,” Askew informed him. He reached into his pocket and removed a datapad. “But they are prepared to be quite generous.”
He held the datapad out. Zaskar took it and scanned the open document rapidly. It was a list of everything the fleet needed to keep functioning, everything from starship components to missiles and ration bars. It was . . . it was unbelievable. It had to be a trap. And yet . . . and yet, he wanted to believe. If the offer was genuine, they could keep wearing away at the Commonwealth until it withdrew from Theocratic Space. They could win!
Moses reached out his hand for the datapad. Zaskar barely noticed.
“You want us to keep the Commonwealth busy,” he said. It was suddenly very hard to speak clearly. “It seems a reasonable price.”
His mind raced. No smuggler could transship so much material into a war zone, not without running unacceptable risks. And no smuggler would have access to cyborg technology. Only a great power could supply the weapons and equipment . . . and only a great power would benefit from keeping the Commonwealth tied down. The list of suspects was relatively short.
And it doesn’t matter, he told himself. They’d have to be alert for the prospect of betrayal, but that was a given anyway. The Theocracy had been the least popular galactic government for decades, even before the war. We could win!
“Very well,” he said. “Let’s talk.”
CHAPTER ONE
AHURA MAZDA
The sound of a distant explosion, muffled by the forcefield surrounding Commonwealth House, woke Kat Falcone as she lay in her bed. Others followed, flickers of multicolored light dancing through the window as homemade rockets or mortar shells crashed into the forcefield and exploded harmlessly. She rolled over and sat upright, blinking as the lights automatically brightened. Her bedside terminal was flashing green. Pointless attacks had been so common over the last year that hardly anyone bothered to sound the alert any longer. The insurgents had yet to realize that no amount of makeshift rocketry would pose a threat to the Commonwealth HQ. Even without the forcefield, Commonwealth House could take the blow and shrug it off. The blasts wouldn’t even scratch the paint.
Not that we’re going to turn off the forcefield to let them try, she thought morbidly as she crossed her arms. That would be pushing fate too far.
She snorted at the thought as she forced herself to key her terminal to bring up the latest set of reports. There was no change, she noted wryly: an endless liturgy of shootings, bombings, gang rapes, robberies, and other horrors undreamed of on Tyre. But Ahura Mazda’s population had been kept under tight control for decades, centuries even. The sudden collapse of everything they’d once taken for granted had unleashed years of pent-up frustrations. She sometimes thought that the insurgency was really a civil war, with Commonwealth troops being engaged only when they got in the way. Ahura Mazda seemed to have gone completely mad.
Damn them, she thought. A final spread of makeshift rockets struck the forcefield outside, then faded away. And damn their dead leaders too.
She looked down at her hands, feeling as if she simply wanted to stay in bed. She’d had plans for the future, once. She was going to get married and see the universe, perhaps by purchasing a freighter and traveling from system to system, doing a little trading along the way. Instead, her fiancé was dead, and she was still in the navy, technically. She hadn’t stood on a command deck for nearly a year. Instead, she was chained to a desk on an occupied world, trying to govern a sector of forty inhabited star systems that had just been liberated from one of the worst tyrannies humanity had the misfortune to invent. The chaos was beyond belief. Ahura Mazda wasn’t the only world going through a nervous breakdown. She’d read reports of everything from mass slaughter to forced deportation of everyone who’d converted to the True Faith.
Years of pent-up frustrations, she reminded herself. She’d been lucky. She hadn’t grown up in a world where saying the wrong thing could get her beheaded. And they have all been released at once.
There was a sharp knock at the door. Kat glared at it, resisting the urge to order the visitor to go away. There was only one person who could come through that door. It opened a moment
