War Against the White Knights (39 page)

Maybe she still could. Arun was clean out of ideas.

“Come on, stop wasting time, Arun,” she said, the light behind her eyes beginning to glow. “You know damned well I’ve never played the ‘we used to be lovers’ card before now. Hear me out.”

“Of course.” He tried to smile. “You’re still my friend…” He wanted to call Springer by her old name, but she had insisted long ago that her old life was over, and in her new life her name was Tremayne.

“Is this compartment secure?” she asked.

“Yes.” Arun frowned. “Unless Indiya was lying to me. She said this compartment had the most watertight cyber security and anti-eavesdropping systems a freak could devise.”

The mention of the admiral’s name was like a slap to Tremayne’s face. “What, don’t you trust her?” he asked.

“No. But I don’t think we have an alternative.” She hesitated and bit her lip.

Despite the weighty dilemmas pressing upon him, Arun felt the pull of intrigue at this sight. Whether she called herself Tremayne or Springer, hesitation and uncertainty were not in her nature.

She took a deep breath and spoke what was on her mind. “I guess some secrets need to stay secret, even from those you love the most. It took a few decades to figure that out, but I managed in the end. I didn’t have a choice.”

Arun reached out and touched Tremayne gently on her arm. His gesture surprised him more than her, he suspected. It was the barest touch, but it felt good to connect, even by this gossamer thread, to his oldest ally. “Tell me, my friend. But tell me quickly. We don’t have much time.”

“Scuttlebutt says the first session of your Assembly went so badly, you were lucky to get out alive. Was it really that bad?”

Arun shrugged. “Pretty much. Graz of all people showed more passion than anyone. He nearly won me over. I would guess a majority of the Assembly would vote to take our chances and continue the war. They don’t get a vote. They get a say, to which I will listen, but then I decide.”

“And you would rather pay the price of the Cull to buy peace. Is that so?”

“I don’t know, Phaedra. Graz makes a good case. I want to agree with him. If I look at it in terms of cold logic – the way my planner brain does – the Cull catches only a tiny proportion of the civilian population. If we continue the war, far more would die than would ever be caught by the Cull. Even if we win a fight against the rest of the Trans-Species Union, unlikely as that sounds, so many more would die. Logic says it would be madness to reject the Emperor’s offer. But I hate the Cull with every fiber of my body. I would rather die than accept it, but… my decision is not all about me. What I say in that Assembly over the next few hours affects the destiny of dozens of species. Trillions upon trillions of individuals are relying upon me, and I no longer have…” Arun looked away suddenly.

Tremayne held Arun’s hand. “It’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to pretend Xin doesn’t exist for my sake. I know you miss her. It’s as if there’s an empty hole standing beside you. A Xin-shaped hole that’s annoying the hell out of me because even her absence looks so frakking beautiful. It’s just bad timing that she’s so pissed at you now.”

“Even Pedro seems to be avoiding me.” He tightened his grip on Tremayne’s hand. “He should have been speaking at the Assembly. Mountain Root had to fill in for him.”

“Well that’s where you’re wrong.” Tremayne pulled her hand away. For a moment, Arun thought she was angry with him, but she was filled with something other than rage. She was bursting with a Springer-style excitement, the kind that couldn’t be tethered by holding hands.

“Pedro’s not been avoiding you, he’s been busy with me,” she explained. “The Khallenes rejected your invitation to the Assembly as well. Well, guess what? They’ve been occupied with me too. You should trust your friends more, Arun. After all we’ve been through, you should have learned that by now.”

“All right, then. Help me! I need you like never before.”

She grinned, and he was transported back to those simpler days in the Novice dorms beneath Detroit.

“Logic and passion war in you, Arun. The heart versus the mind. You’re like a case study from a course in psychology. You have to choose one or the other, and it’s cutting you up because there’s no escape. Both options are equally intolerable. Yet still you must choose.”

Eyes blazing, she came in close and whispered into his ear so quietly that he had to wait a moment for Barney to interpret her words and replay them inside his head.

“What if there was a third option…?”

The second session of the Assembly was a disaster.

After the first session, Arun had held little hope it would be otherwise, but even he was struck with horror at how quickly the attempts by the initial speakers to debate the issues ground down in recrimination. Accusations hurled across the chamber of treachery and dishonor.

I should never have agreed to this idea of an Assembly,
he thought.
There were too many secrets to begin with and now… now I’m holding the biggest secret of them all.

He trod a thin line between being seen to allow debate and allowing the leadership of the Legion to tear itself apart. In a sense, all of this was pointless; a distasteful charade playing out before Arun announced decisions he had already made. This was politics, not decision-making. Even though he loathed Tawfiq, the Emperor, and the Night Hummers with such all-encompassing revulsion, he was surprised to find room in his breast for a similar level of hatred directed at all things political. He would rather face an impossible tactical position on the battlefield of war than operate another second in the arena of politics. But he couldn’t give up yet. To do so would be to dishonor so much sacrifice.

Finally, when he could stomach no more, he hit the buzzer, calling the chamber to order. But the Assembly was too far gone to settle now. Reluctantly, Arun opened a comm link to Major Exreag.

“Major, please enter and restore order.”

The Littorane Marines invaded the chamber. When they had made their show of strength at the end of the first session, they had been met with distaste, but now for many the reaction was fury.

Why are they here?

Is this a coup?

“I have invited the security detail for your own safety,” said Arun before the accusations grew wilder. “It is abundantly clear that no consensus on this issue is possible. I sought a clear mandate from you, not for myself, but for those who come after us – the civilian authorities who will one day replace the Legion Council as the governing authority of the Human Autonomous Region. That mandate is not forthcoming. Members of the Human Assembly, I am ready to make my decision.”

“Wait!”

Arun knew that voice instantly. He turned his chair and saw Xin erupt into the Assembly Chamber, resplendent in her Lieutenant-General’s dress uniform, and flanked by her staff officers. She had broken house arrest, transferred from
Lance of Freedom
to
Holy Retribution
, passed through a ship on tight security lockdown, and intimidated Major Exreag’s and his Marines to stand aside and permit her entry.

No one moved to stop her. No one dared, least of all Arun.

He ached with love for this magnificent woman.

Arun cleared his throat and hardened his feelings. He could not afford to be her lover at this juncture, nor the father of her child. He could only be General McEwan. “You have no place here,” he told her. “You have been relieved of your responsibilities pending your hearing.”

“Stow it, Arun. I know I took liberties with an order, but I only did so because I was following your commands and not the admiral’s. I get it. Now you get this, McEwan. Just in case you are trying to kid yourself that you’re too important to be anything other than the big commander, let me remind you that I’m carrying your daughter. She will be born in a few months, and if I were sitting in your chair I would not even contemplate signing an agreement whereby she could be handed over for execution if she’s unlucky enough to be selected for the Cull. Don’t think like a general, think like a man. And what kind of a man would ever willingly see his own daughter put to death?”

No kind of a man at all.
Arun believed that with all his spirit, but despite the strength of his feeling, Arun kept his dangerous reply inside his head. Instead, he tried to communicate his confidence to her through his expression.
Trust me! Please, Xin, trust me now. It’s not how it seems.

It worked. It actually worked. He could see Xin’s shoulders relax, marveled as hope touched her eyes.

But even his hinting was too dangerous, especially in such a public venue. He couldn’t take the chance that the Emperor might be watching. Arun hardened his features, and watched the gut-wrenching sight of Xin’s hope die away, to be replaced with horror and disgust.

He loved and admired her, but she made his life so endlessly difficult. This had been their story for the past 136 years.

Arun turned from Xin and her entourage near the entrance to address the chamber, while a bio-ident panel rose out of the front of his chair. “I, General Arun McEwan, on behalf of the Human Legion, and with authority over all worlds of the Human Autonomous Region, agree to be bound by the terms of the Treaty of Athena.” Ignoring the shouts of ‘traitor’, ‘blasphemer’, and ‘we have been betrayed’, Arun peered into the bio-ident panel, and rubbed a little saliva from his mouth to verify his DNA.

“Later today, I expect the other Military Council members to add their bio-idents to the treaty. I give mine now, because before then the Emperor has insisted upon a symbolic gesture of our continued fealty to the Empire, and this gesture may prove fatal to me. We are now vassals of the Emperor. No longer slaves, but still not entirely free. Not yet. Not today.”

The security guards watched the Assembly members closely, but there was no dissent. Arun had chosen for them. There could be no going back now. Most of the members were military field commanders – if there was to be trouble it would be planned and not implemented until the moment of maximum effectiveness. He would have preferred a brawl to this icy tension.

He looked behind, but Xin had already left.

“Who here opposes this treaty?” he asked. “Make yourself known.”

A hush came over the chamber. Its members glanced nervously at each other, but none spoke. Did they really expect him to execute any dissenters? He hadn’t realized trust had broken so completely.

He tried a different tack. “Captain Surasim, you expressed your reservations earlier with a grenade. Please come forward and assist me in my next task. I give you my word that it is not to punish or embarrass you, but I wish your services because your feelings on the treaty are clear, and so those here present know you are not my stooge.”

Surasim reluctantly allowed herself to be brought to the speakers’ platform where Kreippil placed a prisoner hood over her head. Arun had been inside a similar hood when the Hardits had snatched him. He shivered at the memory of what the Hardits had done to him once they removed the hood. All the same, he knew that the captain could only see or hear what the hood was programed to allow. Unlike Arun’s hood, this one did not cover Surasim’s snout, permitting her to speak, but she would see nothing, and hear only Arun’s voice.

Arun asked Barney to activate a series of virtual screens, projections of light that appeared at several locations within the chamber, displaying the same image so that all there could see it clearly; all except the hooded Captain Surasim.

The youthful faces of human Marine Cadets stared out from the screens, the projection arranged so that no matter the position of the observer, the faces always appeared to stare directly at them. There were seventy-two in all, arranged in a grid: the survivors of two years’ worth of cadets who had been rushed to the frontier in 2565, mobilized with such speed that they had temporarily escaped the Cull. Most of them had served with Arun since the very first day of the Human Legion, when it was no more than a rabble of stragglers aboard
Beowulf
. He doubted any of the survivors had forgotten that the prospect of facing the Cull selection still hung over them. Certainly the Emperor had never forgotten. Springer’s face was there, so young and hopeful, in contrast to the bitterness that had accumulated in Tremayne’s breast. Xin was there too, the image taken before that night on Antilles when they had first made love.

Arun took a while to scan the faces, ashamed that he wasn’t sure how many had survived this far into the campaign. He saw Caccamo, and Narciso looking too serious for such a young face, and Stok Laskosk, the heavy weapons specialist who had played such a vital role in the
Beowulf
Mutiny, and the First Tranquility Campaign. He hadn’t talked to Stopcock for years, but would Stok be prepared to speak to
him
after the treaty he’d just signed up to?

Arun stared into his own features. He’d been so naive then, so full of hope. In some ways he had succeeded far beyond his teenage ambitions, but to his heart, those victories felt like the bitterest of defeats.

A number appeared over the image of each cadet, and Captain Surasim’s role became clear to the Assembly. She would be the randomizing factor. She could see none of the faces, nor the numbers. Had she any idea that she was about to determine who would be offered up to the Cull?

Complying with the instructions Arun gave her, the hooded Littorane captain shuffled the grid. The faces stayed in their places, but the numbers were reallocated through the grid each time.

She called for the grid to be randomized five times in quick succession before she paused.

Who would be picked? The evil of the Cull forced its way into Arun’s mind. He could not help but speculate on how he would feel if one person died or another. One of those faces would be selected. One would be sacrificed. One out of seventy-two. He had fought in many battles with higher casualty rates, but the coldness of the Cull had a sour brutality all of its own that made it almost unbearable.

He couldn’t even decide whether he wished to be the one who was sacrificed. In so many ways, he hoped to be picked, but that was a coward’s way out of facing the consequences of his decisions.