Turning Point (Galaxy's Edge Book 7) Read online

  With zhee dropships landing across the city, a Legion scout detachment, Bravo Company, Seventy-Eighth Recon, rotating in on leave from some hot zone out along the edge, reported to the Zephyr, an assault carrier in cradle at the liner docks. It was the same ship that had brought them in only a week before. And as the first wave of zhee assault shuttles touched down all along the outskirts of the sprawling gardenscape that was Phasia, many of the two hundred and fifty odd legionnaires were buckets up and ready to give battle despite the odds and circumstances.

  The Seventy-Eighth Recon was facing a military force of upward of ten thousand radicalized zhee deploying the new N-20 battle rifle system and sporting an advanced armor protection harness similar in effectiveness—without bucket, due to zhee religious concerns—to legionnaire armor.

  The navy commander of the Zephyr was still busy trying to recall all navy and marine personnel when the Legion rode out from the carrier’s assault cargo decks in convoy on scout-cycles and heavier all-terrain tactical engagement carriers (ATTECs), along with motorized utility light equipment (MULEs) armed with mounted N-50s and automatic rocket pods. The first engagements between the light mobile Desert Rats of the Seventy-Eighth Legion Recon and the zhee—now organized into a kind of loose military force—were brutal and fiercely desperate. In normal circumstances the zhee were a pretty tough stand-up fight against the Legion, especially when the zhee had the weight of numbers and access to working military equipment hodge-podged out of whatever weapons bazaar they’d been hovering over as of late. But now the zhee had state-of-the-art weaponry and armor, air support, ship-based artillery support, mechanized transportation, and limited jump capability as provided by their armor.

  And… there were a lot of them.

  Within minutes, it wasn’t so much a battle as a brawl.

  It was quickly made clear to the Legion captain commanding the Seventy-Eighth that a “win” for the Legion meant simply buying time for more civilians to get down into the bunkers and seal the main doors behind them. So for the next two hours, the Legion scout teams made the zhee troops pay dearly for every street, alley, and block. Still, the zhee noose slowly closed about the city—and looting and mindless destruction had half the city in flames.

  At one point the Legion managed to hold five blocks near the center of the city, where they’d set up effective vehicle-based kill zones at major intersections. The zhee tried to take the rooftops but were held at bay by Bravo Company’s highly decorated sniper teams. With casualties mounting on both sides, and the zhee war leader growing more and more frustrated by the minute, the zhee pulled back and called in an orbital strike on the five Legion-held blocks.

  For the next twenty minutes, ship-based energy weapons, tuned to high intensity by the direct power feed from the battle cruisers’ technologically advanced weapons and reactors, eviscerated the Legion-held redoubts inside the fortified city center. Buildings exploded outward, sending collapsing facades and shattered glass in every direction. Massive structures toppled over onto the dug-in ATTECs, burying the defending legionnaires alive. Massive beams carved street-wide gashes through the surviving buildings, and through the mules that had been operating from the alleys. Temperatures in the area rose to upwards of three hundred degrees. Streets turned to muck as impervisteel transformed into its molten state.

  And at the end of it all, the Seventy-Eighth Legion Recon, to a man, was wiped out.

  Fighting at the Zephyr’s docking cradle continued for a while longer. The ship’s PDCs held the zhee at bay for much of the day. But in time, the zhee took the main engine compartments and forced the ship’s captain to surrender.

  So it was that by the arrival of the evanescent purple evening, Phasia was under complete zhee control.

  At around midnight, the entire crew of the Zephyr was beheaded in a mass execution in the Gardens of Reason beneath the Capital Tower, which was then set on fire from the inside. It glowed like the apocalyptic torch of some end-of-the-world giant for most of the night, while the city was pillaged and looted, its remaining citizens savaged. The city’s salvageable art, artifacts, physical credit reserves, and goods were loaded aboard transport and cargo shuttles to be carried off into orbit.

  The only good news for the victims of what would come to be known as The Sack of Phasia was that their subterranean bunker held. The zhee tried, during the entire time of the raid, to violate the entrance to the hyperloop system, but it had been well designed, and they were unable to get at the hidden survivors below.

  Barely twenty-four hours after it all began, the zhee departed, taking the Zephyr with them. As a parting farewell shot, they fired a crustbuster—yet another banned weapon of mass destruction—at the center of the city, right at the main access door guarding the subterranean high-speed rail system. There were an estimated twenty-four thousand citizens of the Republic seeking shelter down there at the moment the planet around them suddenly split open and turned to molten lava. The crustbuster left a smoking crater fifty stories deep, not only killing every last refugee, but destabilizing Demetrion’s crust, preventing it from being safely inhabited for the foreseeable future.

  The zhee did not stop there. They also hit the nearby worlds of Hexa, Muranto, and Callista. None of the cities of those planets suffered as dire a fate as Phasia, but all were looted, ruined, and burned. And all the while the zhee chanted their blasphemies and fired their blasters into the smoke-filled skies above the gutted ruins.

  At last, their bloodlust temporarily sated, the zhee returned to their deadly battle cruisers and leapt back to Fortress Gibraltaar, their new base at Ankalor.

  Unity House

  Utopion

  The schedule of a Legion commander, the highest post held by any Legion general officer, was hectic, to put it mildly, on any average day. Today… was not an average day.

  Legion Commander Keller had just extricated himself from another useless question-and-answer session with a House of Reason select committee tasked with integrating special protected alien minority species into the Legion. The committee had all kinds of studies that supported their aim of diversifying the ranks, and they were demagoguing hard to get their latest pet project of the moment done. Several sector capitals had seen “spontaneous” rallies and marches break out in support of letting non-human species join the Legion. All of the protestors held pre-coded digital holo-signs that were supposed to look homemade. This was, after all, the cause of the moment.

  But Keller suspected this Q&A was really nothing more than a probe to figure out what the Legion was actually up to in lieu of the… problem at Tarrago. Keller had gone into the meeting with his usual poker face, and he’d given them all the same-as-he-always-had common-sense reasons why the Legion needed to remain human-only. At least the House wasn’t once more asking for special exceptions for non-males—not after what had happened the last time.

  Still, both of these issues, as far as the House of Reason was concerned, were always up for negotiation. After all, pounding these particular drums got the House of Reason backbenchers a lot of votes among the aliens. “Alien diversification” was always a talking point in which to tear down the Legion, while conveniently ignoring how equally human-dominated the House of Reason was—and the rest of the Republic, for that matter. Only the Senate had any sense of true representation, due to the Constitutional requirement that their membership include representation from every sentient species and every planet in the Republic.

  For the Legion generals and the NCO core, the backbone of the Legion, this issue was never up for negotiation. They saw it as a play to once more lower fitness and training standards in yet another attempt to weaken the Legion.

  Because that was really the goal. To the House of Reason, the Legion was the real threat. And for good reason.

  The distinguished delegate from Obregon had even wanted to allocate funds to develop a new non drill sergeant–based boot camp, replacing the fundamental training overseer since time immemorial with a new kind of
instructor called a “military lifestyle and career coach.”

  Keller, who never laughed in public, had suddenly guffawed, and then quickly covered the involuntary eruption as a dry cough. The colonel who served as his adjutant might have actually sworn audibly within the Council chambers.

  After that things got real quiet, and the House of Reason focus group was soon gaveled to an end.

  Keller left the hearing room located within Unity House, a massive and very ornate tower complex that hovered over Utopion Prime, and made it to a nearby government landing pad ten minutes later, relieved not to have been waylaid by yet another delegate or senator seeking to sound out the Legion’s loyalty to the Republic with yet another series of questions about everything but the thing they really wanted to know and couldn’t talk about.

  They were nervous.

  They had reason to be.

  Because the Legion had the Constitutional right to end the rule of the House of Reason and the Senate if it chose to.

  In an emergency, the Legion could invoke the nineteenth article—known as the Champion Clause, or simply “Article Nineteen”—contained within the Galactic Republic’s Constitution. This allowed them to assume control of the government for up to six months. Most of the generals had advocated for years that such a maneuver was nearing execution.

  But six months didn’t buy a lot of time to do what needed to be done. Every House of Reason member had to be arrested and tried legally, and then new elections needed to be held so that the House of Reason could be restored and free of corrupt influence. The Senate was a bit easier, though nearly as time-consuming—it could simply be dissolved, and then it was left to the home worlds to elect new senators according to local custom.

  But all of this was politics. Not something the Legion wanted to participate in. Not something it was designed to participate in. The Legion did war, and Keller had no clue why the early legionnaires had thought the Champion Clause was a good idea.

  The shuttle sent to transport Keller to his next meeting landed on Government Pad Thirty-Three, and the adjutant, Colonel Speich, signaled Keller that it was time to board. They were standing inside an expansive and beautifully appointed boarding lounge. Of course, everything about the House of Reason’s governmental offices and facilities was beautiful. Off mic, any member would’ve joked: “If you can’t have the best, why get into politics in the first place?”

  It was an old joke they only told each other.

  As Keller shut down his briefing notes and locked the file with a code, an older man entered the boarding lounge. He was a tall, stoop-shouldered academic type in tweed, his scrawny neck wrapped in a scarf. Long, broken nose. Wispy white hair.

  He made straight for the general of the Legion in long active strides that made clear his intentions were purposeful and that those intentions were to engage in conversation. He had come seeking an audience regardless of hell or high water. Whatever that meant.

  Keller sighed and put on his dress uniform jacket. He’d been going over some reports that didn’t mean anything. Of course the House of Reason had every camera in the facility pointed right at him and his tablet.

  “Excuse me, Legion Commander Keller,” began the old academic.

  But the adjutant colonel, a short, iron-gray-haired bulldog of a man, cut the academic off five steps out. Keller knew that Colonel Speich could kill the man in about two point four seconds with his bare hands alone. He was even a little bit faster than Keller, who did PT with any Legion unit he could find. Every day. He took pride in running young leejes into the ground as he dragged them through sixteen miles of the most grueling terrain he could find, in formation, at the double.

  It pleased him to see them throwing up.

  It was displeasing that, at his age, he could make them do that. There was a time, not long ago, when that would have been an impossibility. The young leejes were too strong for that. But not now. The effects of the constant meddling by the House and Senate had taken a toll.

  Keller especially liked runs that landed on payday. Because the NCOs and the battalion commanders practically begged him to ruin their troops for the weekend before they ruined themselves in the bars. It was not uncommon to have legionnaires pass out in their racks for upwards of twenty-four hours after Legion Commander Keller had finished one of his little runs. Those same legionnaires found that their muscles had turned to iron chains and cramped into immobility as they lay down for just a moment after the grueling morning run, waiting for final payday inspection. For the rest of the weekend they moved like ruined old men.

  “The Legion Commander has another appointment to keep, and we’re already late,” said Colonel Speich in his usual all-business, don’t-make-me kill-you staccato bark.

  “I understand,” began the old academic a bit fustily. “I was just wondering if he had a moment for an old leej from Psydon.”

  Keller heard that, and so did Speich. Psydon was a bad conflict. It had been a little bit before Keller’s time, but the old veterans who’d been his first NCOs had been there, and they’d told him some pretty crazy stories about that brutal conflict. If you were at Psydon, you deserved a measure of respect. It didn’t buy you everything. But it did buy you something.

  “You were at Psydon?” asked Keller, as though he were challenging the old man to tell another lie.

  The old man nodded and seemed to stand a little straighter, though his bony shoulders remained bent.

  “I was. Sergeant, Tenth Recon. Pathfinder. Call sign Creeper. I got hit at the Aachon Reservoir.”

  Everybody knew about the Aachon Reservoir. It was the kind of battle where legends and heroes were made. And where they died too.

  Speicher clasped his hands and stepped back, and Keller stepped forward and shook the old vet’s hand, murmuring, “Sergeant.”

  The Legion might have been slowly changing from what it once was, but it hadn’t changed so much that it had forgotten the leejes who’d gone before.

  “What can I do for you?” Keller asked.

  The old man cast his gaze about. He knew they were watching. Knew they knew what this meant. He, too, was casting the dice. Letting them fly. He was siding with the Legion once more. For now.

  “After Psydon,” said the old man, leaning in close, “I joined the intelligence services.”

  Keller nodded. He knew Dark Ops well. Relied on them more and more. But he didn’t know this man. Some… other intelligence group, perhaps? Those made him feel uneasy. Nether Ops? They were the devil.

  “Nether Ops… to be specific,” said X, the old academic, calmly. “And I have some very important information I think you’re going to need to hear. May I accompany you? I feel that my life is in danger, Commander.”

  ***

  The shuttle lifted away from the high landing pad alongside the government tower and joined the outbound traffic racing through Utopion’s skies. Keller sat facing opposite X. Colonel Speich was seated in a flight chair across the shuttle’s narrow aisle. Keller assumed a distant observer’s poker face that he’d found worked best in just about every situation.

  X settled himself in his seat and cast his melancholic gaze out the porthole at the beautiful land below. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he said, as though he were speaking only to himself and only observing the heavy ship traffic over Utopion. Out near the Grand Council Hall, the immense bulk of a super-destroyer waited, hovering just over the ornately sculpted monument to social justice government at its pinnacle.

  Keller said nothing, content to wait and see how the hand of the other man sitting across from him was played out.

  “Thoreau,” X murmured.

  Keller had no idea what that meant. He wasn’t interested in poetry, or some history lecture. In ten minutes they would reach Legion HQ and the interview would be over. The man before him would either say what he came to say… or he wouldn’t. In a few minutes the opportunity would be lost.

  “The ‘mass of men’—that’s the impo
rtant point in that little bit of phrasing I just repeated. Or rather, it’s my point, Commander.”

  Keller, who’d decided to see this through without saying a word, suddenly lost his patience and sighed. “What is your point?”

  X turned to face the commander. Studied him intently for a long moment. As though he were trying to see if the younger man before him was the man required for this moment, this time, this hour come too suddenly.

  X nodded to himself as if having reached some conclusion. “But not them,” he said X, tilting his head toward the porthole and the grand majesty of a super-destroyer riding just over the top of the Grand Chamber of the House of Reason. “They are not the mass of men. Not when you can ensure that the Constitution is used as your own heavily armed lifeboat. That makes them a little different than the rest of us, doesn’t it, Commander?”

  Keller had been clenching his fists. Becoming aware of this, he flexed his fingers and wished for a little range time. Heck, he wished for a company and a mission. He’d always been a leej in that way.

  After composing himself and running a quick hand across his dress uniform, he said, “No. It does not.”

  And then nothing more. No commentary of bitter indictment against the takers who only ever took. Just a loyal soldier who knew he was on the losing end of things and still did the right thing anyway. Still kept his shield locked with his brother legionnaires. Still held the line despite the odds. It was the only way when one was surrounded. Hold on to the known. Stay true.

  “They,” said X, nodding again toward the House of Reason beyond the porthole, “have just turned over Fortress Gibraltaar to the zhee. On Ankalor.”

  Keller’s face, a face of a cool, calm, controlled card player, dropped. Shock and disbelief were replaced by rage. Not a loose word or gesture escaped him, but the effect of X’s revelation was like some airstrike that had hit the bunkers far below, ravaging his unseen subsurface. The ground merely shook, but everything underneath had become chaos and destruction. Death and darkness.