Enemy commanders surrounded by divisions of crack infantry were rated lower in difficulty.
“Who is he, Jack? Well, ain’t that the question on everyone’s lips,” answered Reiser. “Fingers, and even tentacles, are crawling across all the data archives trying to put the pieces together. Who is this guy who’s basically financing his own war machine on a small planet on galaxy’s edge that most people think isn’t worth the effort because of how ornery the Kublarens are. Not to mention the zhee that arrived. Interesting, huh? Who is he really? You got that right, Jack. That is the big question.”
Bowie said nothing.
“You heard the rumors? About him. You heard ’em, Jack? Because they are crazy.”
“Some,” Jack muttered and scanned the room for threats.
Reiser leaned close and began to speak.
“Did you hear the one about how when he was a kid, his dad, some kind of planetary development scientist, and his mom, she was the brainy type too, did you hear they were out on some world and Gomarii slavers murdered the both of ’em. Let the other slaves rape the mom. Killed the dad afterward. Sold the kid to Djini nomads crossing out near Grayson’s Storm. Doing one of their hundred-year pilgrimages into the nebulae to seek enlightenment and all that crazy talk. Have you heard that one, Jack?”
Again, Bowie said nothing because this was all rhetorical. Reiser had always liked a bit of theater and so that was what this was. A story. A story about a boogeyman. Or rather a boogeyman that might just be their savior. Because the boogeyman was paying salaries and bonuses for the boogey work he needed done.
“Well… Jack,” continued Reiser, low and conspiratorially. “If you’ve heard that part then maybe you’ve heard the next part of the story. Have you? Feel free to stop me if you have. Two years later that Djini nomad ship comes out of the nebulae and makes straight for the Gomarii hideout that did the parents. The normally peaceful Djini kill the Gomarii and the kid disappears for five years out there along the edge where space gets real weird. Where rumors aren’t just made-up stories about ghosts seeking vengeance, well hell, they might even be real. If you believe in that sort of thing. Do you, Jack? Do you believe in the vengeful dead? ’Cause I never did until I started trying to dig on the person we are talking about myself. Or at least I never used to.”
Bowie remained still. The zhee were starting to eat and the sounds coming from the private lounge verged on the obscene. A woman screamed, and then, dressed in the livery of the hotel, ran from the lounge with her starched white shirt torn open. The zhee brayed with delight at her humiliation.
Reiser looked over and gave a sick little laugh. And a look that said, Well, you know how they are.
“There’s another story, Jack. Maybe you’ve heard of this one too. It’s a really, really good one. There’s this story that says he surfaced again in his mid-teens. So, this is about fifteen. Which is kind of incredible considering the first rumors about him and the Djini wiping out a Gomarii slaver base start to circulate just a few years prior. And not just one base. Apparently the Djini and their… translated in their backwards language, “death savior” went to town on all the Gomarii they could find in that sector. And it wasn’t pretty. No. Not at all. Real galactic Dark Ages stuff. Stuff like the Savages used to do to the worlds that betrayed them during the Protectorate. The Gomarii that year got real afraid of getting ‘the workout’ as it was called, from the Djini and their Death Savior.
“We looked into this back at Nether Ops because we heard the Gomarii were running scared and kept talking about ‘the workout.’ We used the Gomarii a lot back then to cover our transit operations. And they were getting real hard to work with because I’ll tell you, they were straight up afraid of somebody. As near as we could tell, this Death Savior had an elite guard who called themselves the Divine Wind. They trained him, the kid, the Death Savior, to kill just as they were trained from birth to kill in their… what they called, the Forgotten Clans. The only way to ascend through their ranks was to kill the person in the position you wanted. You know how the Djini are. Didn’t you get into a scrap aboard the Carascar when you ran interdiction on one of their Nomad ships trying to escape into the Suribacco Nebulae? Seems so if I remember correctly. Half your boarding party got killed, right, Jack? Back when you were an ensign attached to the hullbusters? Musta looked real bad on your junior OER. Is that how you ended up with the bastards in Intel? The Castaways they called them.”
Bowie gave nothing away.
Reiser checked his chrono quickly and then looked up at a news stream running over near the bar as if to confirm something. Whether he found it or not was unclear.
“We got time,” the older man said to himself and then settled back into his stories and rumors. “So, after all that playing vengeful pirate, the kid turns up at Oxodon University right smack dab on Utopion itself. Gets in on a scholarship under an assumed name and basically lives like a beggar for three years. Practically lives in the virtual library access node and learns everything. Now when I say… learns everything… you think I mean he’s real smart. Right? Like the guy who’s always called “Brain” in the platoon. That guy. Well, that ain’t even close. In three years he tests out of three doctorates and gets advanced into their theoretical programs and think tanks. Secret stuff. House of Reason funded. Black magic
