Lydia nodded. “Sure. He visited me in class.”
Brennan blinked. “In class? Really?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“You don’t think that was odd?”
“Kayle always visits when he’s home.”
“He interrupts classes?”
Lydia pouted a little, causing Brennan to roll his eyes. She might be everyone’s favorite princess, but she was such a drama queen.
“No,” she admitted, “usually he drops by here.”
“Yeah.” Brennan nodded. “OK. Thanks, Lyd.”
Brennan stepped back and started to leave, but Lydia called out after him. “What’s going on, Bren?”
“I don’t know,” Brennan admitted, three words he didn’t often utter, whether they were true or not. “Just … don’t go anywhere too far for a couple days, OK? Kayle’s acting weird, and you know what it takes to get one of those soldier boy types up in arms.”
Lydia smiled, giggling a bit. “Yeah. OK, I’m not going anywhere anyway.”
“Good. I’ll be around, sis.”
“Bren,” Lydia called, smirking in his direction. “What did Kayle promise you to get you interested in what I’m doing?”
Brennan sighed. “He said he’d qualify me if I watched out for you for the next couple days.”
Lydia giggled at him. “You’re so easy to buy off, Bren.”
Brennan rolled his eyes as he left. “Just remember what I said, OK? I’ll be in my rooms.”
“Speak with you soon, brother … ,” she called after him, her voice taunting him slightly in singsong fashion.
Brennan frowned as he got out of there, wondering how it was possible that almost everyone else saw his sister as the perfect princess but somehow saw him as the brat.
Life sucked.
“Course and speed update.”
The words were delivered quietly, but with no chance of being missed by those standing their stations on the Caleb’s enclosed quarterdeck.
“We just crossed eighteen times sound, groundspeed, captain,” a man answered. “Course holding en route to capital.”
Corian nodded, absently scratching the patch that covered his damaged eye. This itch is driving me insane. Damn that woman.
“Arrival time?”
“Within the quarter hour, captain.”
“Good. Sound combat alarms and bring everyone to their stations,” Corian ordered, taking a seat at the large chair that backed the room. His armor projector instantly connected to the ship’s systems, linking him into all available information, but for now he ignored it all.
Until they were in a fight, in his experience, it was better to keep the crew involved with their commanding officer. Asking them for information ensured that they were in the moment as well and not being lulled off to some dreamland of distractions.
Once the blasters started lasing, then he’d lean on the projection systems, but not until then.
“Beth”—he leaned to port, where Jessup was standing—“strike coordinates?”
“Entered, checked, and confirmed,” she answered professionally, “just as you ordered, captain. We can end this before anyone even knows we’re there.”
“Don’t get too confident, Bethany,” he chided lightly. “They still have a full regiment of Cadre down there. We have to end the fight before they know what happened, or we’ll be cut to ribbons.”
She nodded, knowing that it was the simple truth. The Imperial Cadre were a fighting force unmatched in the empire, lavished with the highest levels of training and equipment and culled from bloodlines that could fully interact with projection systems and those damned Armati.
“Are you certain you can contain them afterward?” she asked softly, a hint of concern in her voice.
Corian nodded. “The Cadre can’t act … won’t act without direct orders from the emperor. It’s not only in the charter; it’s the oath they swore. If the general orders them into action against that oath, he’ll have a civil war on his hands.”
She nodded uncertainly but didn’t question him.
“No, love,” he went on, drawing a smile from her, “we’re on a high-risk operation, but have faith in my plan. There is a true victory condition here, not the illusionary ones we’ve been fighting for over the past few years.”
“I have faith, captain.”
“Good,” he said, glancing aside at a bit of data floating near the corner of his eye. “We’re approaching the launch window. Speed?”
“Almost twenty times sound, captain,” the man standing the helm called out automatically. “Launch velocity will be reached on schedule.”
“Stand by, weapons!”
“Launchers standing by.”
“Locks loose! Fire as she bears!” Corian ordered.
The Caleb Bar sailed on for a moment, seemingly without response to the order, and then a shudder ran through the ship as they reached the first launch point.
“First rack away, captain. Trajectory looks good—impact in three minutes.”
Corian leaned back in his chair and closed his one good eye. “And so history marches on. The emperor is dead …”
Jessup placed a hand on his shoulder, whispering, “Long live the emperor.”
Launched at twenty times the speed of sound from over two hundred miles above the surface, the weapons were simple kinetic projectiles. Initially they fell unchallenged through the thin atmosphere that high up, eventually plunging into the thicker gasses below. Guidance fins came into play as the weapons locked onto their targets from a hundred miles above and three hundred out.
Moving twenty-eight times the speed of sound by the time they stopped accelerating, having reached equilibrium with the air and gravity, the projectiles crossed the distance from the ship in the blink of an eye and were inside the capital’s air-defense system before the warning alarm sounded. Air-defense systems were still moving to track when the first projectile slammed into the palace with the force of a small atomic weapon.
The missiles were made of the same material as the palace, a metal formula beyond the ken of Imperial science. No one knew where the alloy had come from, but it was one of the hardest materials they’d ever discovered.
It was that alloy that made the palace, Redoubt, and few other such fortresses nearly impenetrable.
It was also that alloy that turned conventional bombardment weapons into fortress busters.
The impacts rocked the capital, shaking things to the foundations as shock waves rolled out, but where the missiles struck, the penetrator tips blasted right through walls and continued on to tear into the interior of their targets.
The Imperial hangars took three hits, alloyed penetrators punching holes through the roof and then proceeding to ricochet around the interior. Men and machines were torn to shreds with equal ease in a split second of nightmarish chaos. When it was over, less than a minute had passed, but for those who’d been miraculously passed over by the angel of death, a lifetime had passed, and they felt aged a thousand years.
Across the capital and the palace, similar strikes continued unabated over the next three minutes, and then everything went silent.
“All weapons away, captain.”
“Stand down bombardment,” Corian ordered. “Send the signal to the others, then rig us for atmospheric braking and take us down.”
“Aye, captain. Rigged for air brakes, reversing tractor drive. We’re losing altitude.”
The Caleb Bar began to shudder slightly as it dipped down into ever thickening atmosphere, the air brakes helping the slow but powerful tractor drive begin to claw inexorably at the fabric of the universe as it slowed the ship’s forward rush. Ahead of them, the capital could now be seen, smoke from the kinetic strikes billowing over the city with the first flashes of weapons fire.