The Phoenix Darkness (14 page)

It was his fault she was here; he should
never have given in to her request to come along, he knew far
better than she did what the dangers were. Just as surely as it was
his fault they’d been taken captive. He shouldn’t have trusted Alex
or made the ship linger there for so long. And, most importantly,
he should have taken Rafael’s advice and transmitted their
intelligence to the queen. At least then they would have died for
something.

Instead, Calvin had been a coward; he’d
wanted to have it all. And because of that, he realized, he ended
up with nothing.

***

The chime rang, startling her awake. She
lifted her head from her desk, realizing she must have fallen
asleep. She waited silently, knowing if this business were truly
urgent the chime would ring again. It did.

“Come in,” said Kalila loudly from her seat,
taking only a second to correct her appearance.

The door slid open and in stepped a yeoman
from the
Black Swan
’s bridge. She had a slight greyness
showing in her otherwise midnight hair, despite being no older than
thirty-five. She had a common looking face, but even so, Kalila was
quite certain she'd never seen the woman before. Probably because
it was now the Red Shift, Kalila realized, as she blinked at the
clock on her desk. Again, she’d burned the midnight oil well beyond
her advisors’ recommendations, yet no matter how hard she pressed
herself to personally manage everything, the marathon of tasks
before her seemed to grow a mile for every step she ran.

“Pardon the interruption at this hour, Your
Highness,” the yeoman bowed. In her hands was a folder of
documents; she presented them for the queen to see. “I have the
quarter-hourly report for you, Your Highness. Commander Dabney
ordered it be delivered to you without delay.”

“Set it here,” said Kalila, beginning to
regret her decision to be given regular updates every four hours.
Perhaps every eight hours would have been better,
she
thought, knowing anything urgent would of course be brought to her
immediately anyway. “Be sure to pass along my compliments to
Commander Dabney for her attention to duty.” Kalila noted the
yeoman had arrived with the report exactly on the hour and not a
minute late.

The yeoman nervously set the report on
Kalila’s desk and then quickly returned to a more appropriate, and
respectful, distance. “Yes, Your Highness, I will.” The yeoman
said, stifling the anxiety in her voice. “Of course, right away.”
She bowed again, then looked uncertain as to what to do next.
Kalila surmised this must be the yeoman’s first personal encounter
with royalty.

“Thank you; you may go,” said Kalila,
glancing to the door.

The yeoman bowed once more, then left. The
door swished closed and Kalila was again in the company of silence.
Only this time, instead of nodding off while trying to make sense
of the latest strategic recommendations from the
Joint-Knights-Commander, her panel of military advisors, she gave
her undivided attention to the newest report, despite the fatigue
pressing heavily upon her.

The first thing she checked, as always, was
for any changes observed along or inside the DMZ. If the Rotham
were to attack with any kind of massive force, they must pass
through that region first, which, now that the Alliance apparently
no longer existed to deter them, the Rotham could do with impunity.
Once they did, the entirety of The Corridor would become vulnerable
and any number of systems became viable targets. If an
invasion-sized Rotham war fleet were on its way, it likely could
not avoid detection by the Imperial listening posts.

The Imperial listening posts were a massive
grid of mostly automated systems designed to detect starship
traffic near any Imperial borders, but most particularly inside the
DMZ. Unfortunately, the DMZ was a vast swath of space, and the
listening posts could only properly monitor a certain distance in.
Their information became increasingly unreliable, as larger and
larger gaps opened up, the farther inside the DMZ they tried to
penetrate. Nevertheless, they were the first defense against a
Rotham invasion, an alarm system of sorts, and so it was with
religious attention that Kalila kept checking the summary of data
from the listening posts before all else whenever she received her
quarter-hourly reports.

This report, like all of the others before
it, carried the welcome but baffling news that all remained quiet
inside the DMZ. No Rotham fleet to be seen anywhere within range of
detection, leaving her again wondering, as she always did,
why
do they wait to attack?
Surely the opportune moment for them
had to have been right after the Battle of Apollo when the Imperial
forces were most-bloodied and hadn’t yet had any chances to repair.
Yet the Rotham had stayed their hand…despite Calvin’s warning,
which had arrived about that same time.
Perhaps they too are
waiting for something
, she thought,
before they can
strike
, although her imagination could not fathom possibly
what.
Or perhaps Calvin’s warning was wrong
…

Some people thought it so, she knew. The lack
of any fleet materializing at their doorstep had led some to
question her warning as bad intelligence. Others even, as Caerwyn
no doubt steered them in that direction, took it as evidence that
she was paranoid. But her most prudent of advisors remained
cautious and seemed to believe the warning had been accurate and
the Rotham fleet were simply waiting, perhaps for the Empire to let
its guard down. Perchance for the Imperial forces to clash once
again, further reducing humanity’s ability to resist invasion. Or
maybe for something else, something even more nefarious than she or
any of her advisors could think of.

Kalila knew Calvin; she'd been able to judge
his type quite readily upon studying him, and knew that, despite
having a career in the intelligence field, he was not one
programmed for deceit. At least not deceit toward his own allies.
Calvin, at the very least, believed his own warning. And Kalila
trusted that, just as surely as she trusted her own, long-formed,
deeply-seeded expectation she’d held ever since The Great War: that
the Rotham were the greatest danger, the greatest enemy and,
treaties and de-militarized zones notwithstanding, they were coming
back, sooner or later with a vengeance. And now the door was
finally open. All that remained was for them to fly through it.

The rest of the report, for the most part,
was fairly predictable: repairs and refits continued on her forces
across a dozen star systems at almost the exact pace her
Engineering Corps had estimated. Several more ships had been added
to the list of those ready for action, while others, ones which had
been waiting in queue for precious resources to become available,
were only now starting their repairs. Fortunately, because she had
prioritized repairs on the most critical and most injured ships
first, that meant the majority of her squadrons were largely
battle-ready and the newest round of repairs should proceed at a
much faster clip.

Some of her squadrons had begun to organize
into a response fleet as per her orders. Currently they numbered
less than one-hundred warships and, although impressive, Kalila
knew she wouldn’t be comfortable until the response fleet numbered
at least four-hundred warships, if not more. Their duty was to
remain on constant battle-alert status and immediately jump to the
assistance of any squadron, outpost, essential structure, or star
system which had declared for Kalila and experienced a major
attack. With
major
being a fast and loose reference to
“attack of significant scope that the local defenses are
inadequate.”

Although there'd been some saber-rattling
between the Steward’s squadrons and hers, and enemy ships had been
trying to bait parts of her forces into ambush and the reverse,
there had yet to be any significant engagement between the two
militaries since their colossal confrontation at the Apollo Yards.
That battle alone was responsible for the total loss of some
forty-percent of the Imperial fleet, in both resources and lives,
affecting both sides fairly equally. With the overwhelming majority
of ship destructions taking all hands with them, the blood which
had gone into the elimination of the mighty Apollo Yards proved a
heavy toll. It was a price that felt like a weight around her neck
during her waking hours and haunted her sleep whenever she managed
to find any.

Yet it was not guilt over the many casualties
from Apollo that had gotten to her. No, she would not allow herself
to feel guilty for the tremendous death toll. At first she had,
blaming herself and her plan for the engagement’s failure to limit
casualties, but the force of that guilt had proven overwhelming.
And she could not lead and continue to make decisions that would
mean sending men and women to their deaths if she felt herself
handcuffed by the disastrous results everyone involved knew might
occur. Especially when she’d done her job, as best she’d known how,
and devised the finest plan she could in order to minimize
casualties. The fact that Caerwyn Martel had somehow uncovered her
plot and set an ambush was probably someone’s fault, but not her
own. And so she would not allow it to weigh her down.

The deaths had been regrettable, of course,
though only half of them could she feel true feelings for. The
deaths of the enemy, although fellow humans and fellow Imperials,
had been the result of rebellion against the crown. She wished
they'd seen the error of their ways sooner or could have escaped
the propaganda trap that chained them to their posts fighting on
the wrong and losing side of an unfortunate civil war. But she
could do nothing for them, so she refused to feel anything for
them.

As for the other half of the casualties, her
own loyal officers and crews, her heart did go out to them and
their families. She did not feel guilt for their deaths, she
pointedly refused, but she nonetheless regretted their loss and
felt it as she read through the casualty reports, a task she
promised herself she would perform after every engagement. Every
soldier or officer who died in her service deserved to at least
have her read his or her name when that man or woman paid the
ultimate price. Which, after a monumental clash like the Battle for
Apollo, took a great deal of time. Still, she had done it, but she
did not weep. For even as she read the names, giving them tribute
in that small way and feeling the loss of what their presence had
given her war effort, she could not truthfully mourn them. For what
they'd done was offer their lives upon the altar of patriotic duty,
something to be honored, to be respected, not something to be
bewailed and bemoaned.

No, it truly wasn’t the spilt blood which
haunted her; it was the reality that so much had been spent on one
solitary engagement. That should her fleet and her enemies continue
to meet under similar circumstances, there might not be any
Imperial fleet left for her by the time she ended the war and took
the throne. If that was so, even standing atop the might of a
reunified Empire, how could she possibly protect her people?
Especially with resources such as the Apollo Yards no longer
available to hurriedly rebuild the Fleet? Not to mention that such
was an unrealistic timetable, given Calvin’s warning about the
Rotham and the Alliance…
The Rotham are coming
, she often
thought, as she lay awake at night in those precious hours when she
desperately needed to be asleep.
I can feel them coming
…

If the Rotham did come, as she knew they
would, for years she’d been certain of this, how could she possibly
protect her people if all that was left for her to command were the
ashes of starships and the blood of dead soldiers? And if she could
not protect her people, then will all of this have been worth it?
Or had she inadvertently caused the very end she’d originally done
everything to avoid?

Can I really live up to my family
name?
she wondered, thinking about the rich legacy of her
great-great grandfather, the savior of humanity.
Can I honestly
even claim to be any better for our people than my father was, or
am I a mere footnote in history? Or worse, remembered for all time
as the Last Akira, the final monarch before the fall of
humanity…before the Rotham came to slaughter and subjugate us,
picking up where they’d left off before my forbearers stopped
them…

It was a grim thought, and one difficult to
escape from, but she did her best not to let it suppress her
spirits. Hope was a weapon in its own right, and she did all she
could to demonstrate and share her hope with her advisors,
officers, and everyone she could. She wanted hope to be a
contagious disease that took firm root among her loyal supporters
and, like a sturdy tree standing fierce against a gale wind, be
irremovable.

“The repairs are going without delay, most of
our forces are in some kind of battle-ready status,” she mumbled
aloud, in part to keep herself awake and partly to remind herself
of the less bleak aspects of the situation. “We are gaining
systems, not losing them, and still almost no desertions to report
among all my retainers…which is more than I can say for that damned
Caerwyn Martel.”

It was true. Since she’d made her
announcement of the creation, or rather
restoration
of the
Imperial Assembly in the form of the Royal Assembly, a number of
representatives had fled Capital World and declared themselves for
her. Now some eighty-nine representatives, fifty-nine of which had
defected from Capital World, convened as an official governmental
body aboard the ISS
Indomitable
until proper headquarters
could be arranged. There was any number of core worlds willing to
host the body, and Kalila knew the Royal Assembly would eventually
need a permanent, fixed home. But she also knew implanting them
somewhere would elevate one of her worlds to the status of capital,
whether de facto or by official decree, and that might show undue
favoritism on her part in the eyes of her other worlds as well as
create a ripe new target for the Steward and his rebellious forces
to focus their violence, a new vulnerability for her to defend.