Evan Currie - Heirs of Empire

“Not bad,” he said. “Not quite as good a match as my own Turo, but not bad.”

He looked over at his remaining men. “He didn’t come alone. Find the others. Kill them.” He paused. “And for the sake of the depths, don’t let them get as close to you as he did,” the general continued. “I’d rather not lose all my men before the revolution even starts. Idiots.”

Mira Delsol paused at the crest of a dune, checking the power rating on her armor projector. Without the armor protecting her from the sun above, she knew she wouldn’t last three days in the desert, let alone the weeks it would take to get back to civilization. Unfortunately the charge was already down by 70 percent, and she only had a couple chargers left from scavenging the wreck of the train.

And it didn’t really help that she wasn’t heading toward civilization.

The Redoubt was a few more hours’ march from her position. She was close enough that she’d been treated to an impressive light show when the air-defense systems cut loose an hour or so earlier. Mira wasn’t sure what that was all about but could only hope that loyalists were still holding the Redoubt against Corian’s forces.

She only wished she were that lucky.

Not having many other options, however, she pushed on through the desert sands. There was a trick to walking on moving sand, a rhythm to the motion you had to follow to avoid wasting energy and time. She wasn’t a master, but she could dance to the tune, and Mira was making decent speed as she wound her way through the dunes rather than climbing every one.

It was almost the break of first light past Siden’s Great Island when she came into sight of the Redoubt. With the cover of darkness just about to be taken from her, Mira settled down below the peak of a dune and shifted her projected armor to match the sand around her. With the sun perpetually above, there was no shade to seek save for that of the Great Islands, and it would be another twelve hours before Zaius’s Great Island floated past.

I should be able to sit out the day on my current charge, Mira believed as she considered her options. Use one of my chargers as the shadow passes and move on to the Redoubt, then.

It wasn’t much of a plan, she was all too aware, but it was what she had to work with. Her armor and her Armati Elan were the only tools she had to her name. For all that, Mira couldn’t have asked for better tools, even if she might have wished for more.

The Armati was one of the most versatile weapons ever devised, a weapon of a bygone era that none quite knew how to replicate. Her armor wasn’t quite so unique, but mobile projection of latticework photons was restricted to military use by nature of how much it cost to build a projector that small. Well, some civilian applications existed, depending on your definition of mobile, but the Cadre projection emblems cost more than a year’s worth of squadron reaction fuel.

If she had to choose only one weapon and one defense, Mira had no doubt she had the best she could have asked for.

She just would have liked a few more options when tasked with assaulting an entrenched fortification like the Redoubt.

Like an army, perhaps?

Of course, while she was wishing for things, she might as well ask for a tactical strike.

The Great Island had moved on, leaving her in the sunlight for nearly a full hour as the heat climbed steadily and quickly. Her armor could quite effectively keep her cool, but its primary mechanism for that was to reflect the light and heat away, and as that would reveal her position, it wasn’t an option. The sand itself reflected away a fair degree of the sun’s light and energy, but it still absorbed enough heat to leave her sweating away irreplaceable water and salt.

She ignored it as best she could, not moving to brush the sweat from her eyes as it could expose her position. This was unlikely, given that the heat shimmer from the desert itself should mask any shift in her own armor, but with someone like Corian leading the enemy forces, it was best not to take chances.

She hadn’t been watching for long when a flash from the Redoubt startled her, the rumbling echo of an explosion reaching her several seconds later.

Someone’s kicked off a party.

Mira took a few moments to decide what to do, but there wasn’t really much of a decision to make. No matter how she cut it, she could use the chaos of the explosion to mask her own infiltration. She might not get another one, and she really wanted just one clean shot at Corian before her life came to an end.

With that firmly in mind, Mira leapt from the shallow pit she’d dug into the side of the dune and broke into a loping sprint.

Mira loaded one of her last two chargers into her armor, powering it up to full as she approached the smoking Redoubt.

The structure’s angled black metal was similar to that of the palace, though considerably smaller overall. The Redoubt was nearly indestructible, though it was apparent that whatever had happened to it had pushed those limits nearly to the breaking point.

Scorched earth tactics. Corian took what he wanted, torched the rest.

She stepped over a still-smoking piece of shrapnel and paused at the gaping hole where a large pair of doors had once been.

Overpressure wave blew them halfway across the desert from the looks of things.

The Redoubt might be intact, but with a blast wave like that she doubted anything inside it would have survived in one piece. That meant that even if Corian had left anything inside, it wasn’t likely she’d be able to use it.

She found the first bodies a short distance inside the Redoubt, curling her lips up as she recognized them as some of the men-at-arms she’d been assigned for the transport operation. They were scorched and blackened, still smoking slightly and giving off a chemical smell from the remnants of the explosive, but it wasn’t the explosion that had killed them.

Mira recognized the gaping wounds caused by a blaster and the deep slashes that were distinctive of a Cadre Armati.

She walked through the scene, eyes seeking something she knew would be there—knew in her gut.

The burned projector emblem caught her eye and she paused by another smoking body, but this one hadn’t been killed with a blaster or an Armati. She knelt by him and pushed the body over, looking for features she could recognize.

Other than the black holes burned into him by the gamma burster carbines, she couldn’t find much of anything she recognized. The explosion had done a good job of masking any obvious evidence of identity, and she didn’t have the time or resources to look for the less obvious.

The Redoubt, even in its current state, would shelter her from the sun and provide water. Even if the well were damaged, she was confident she could harvest condensation from the interior of the Redoubt’s shell. So she wasn’t about to die anytime too soon, though without food she still had a turning clock to worry about.

First thing, Mira thought, is to see to the bodies.

There was a pit in the dunes not far from the entrance that would be suitable for the men-at-arms, but she had at least one body here that deserved a bit more.

Nothing to do but get to it, Mira supposed. This would be the second good man she put in a hole since the operation had begun.

The shadow time was half past before she was done. Nearly a half century of men-at-arms were piled four deep in the pit, and three individual markers rested on holes she’d dug by hand. It had taken her hours to clear the Redoubt as best she could but only minutes to be certain that she’d arrived too late to do anything. That left her with the duty of burying the dead, instead of saving the living.