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  Space Knights: Last on the Line

  Book 1 of the War for Marain series

  By Emerson Fortier

  Table of Contents

  Prologue: The Last Evangelist

  Chapter 1: Moses // A Philosophy for Life

  Chapter 2: Charles // Corporate Combatants

  Chapter 3: Charles // General Falkye

  Chapter 4: Ephesus // Recruiting

  Chapter 5: Moses // Confession

  Chapter 6: Charles // The Fete

  Chapter 7: Charles // The Kamele

  Chapter 8: Moses // Base Camp

  Chapter 9: Irenaeus // The demonstration

  Chapter 10: Moses // Sword Play

  Chapter 11: Moses // Kyra

  Chapter 12: Charles // Reviewing ranks

  Chapter 13: Moses // Running

  Chapter 14: Moses // Argo

  Chapter 15: Moses // Orders

  Chapter 16: Moses // Officer’s Flags

  Chapter 17: Moses // Disturbances

  Chapter 18: Moses // First Shots

  Chapter 19: Moses // The Slaughter of Bresia

  Chapter 20: Moses // In the Trenches

  Chapter 21: Charles // Damage report

  Chapter 22: Moses // The Siege of Song Grass Hill

  Chapter 23 : Carthalo // What’s to come

  Epilogue : Moses // Last on the Line

  “Headlong is the only way to pass through the gate to the afterlife.”

  Deo Omnis Gloria

  Prologue: The Last Evangelist

  “I love you, but you’re an asshole, just an asshole.” When she left him she was not angry. Only disappointed. In a way that was the worst part. If she had been angry, he might have been able to try to justify his weakness, his cheating. She was pregnant, they hadn’t been intimate in almost six months, and a man had needs, but a woman had needs too, and he’d betrayed them. More than once. “I can do better.” He told her, the same as he’d told her last time, but she’d shaken her head and left without another word. It felt like a lifetime ago, when Marain was still beneath his feet and the air he breathed wasn’t stale with the stench of his own sweat, yet the way she’d looked at him still stood out in his mind like a knife buried in his chest, a wound still fresh despite the distance he’d come to escape it. The shame of it, more painful than the agony that had become his world these last two weeks.

  Human beings were unfit for combat. Two weeks of nonstop battle around a tiny moon had been more than sufficient to convince him he shouldn’t be there. The ship AI and the automata it deployed in their defense were faster to respond and better able to survive the grueling high G maneuvers than frail humanity ever could be. There was no reason for him to be there. None whatsoever. At least none he cared to accept anymore. War was a machine’s domain. He should have left it to them. Fool.

  Samuel was torn from his reverie as the maneuvering rockets on the battleship “St. John” lit and he whimpered as his command chair swiveled in its mounting to compensate for the brutal six gravity acceleration. Even damped by the acceleration chair’s motion, the force of it made him choke as his esophagus flattened against the back of his neck. “Make it stop.” He prayed into the agony. The roar of the ships engine, the information displayed around the command chair, none of it mattered anymore. For Samuel, there was only the agony. In any other circumstances the brutal maneuvers he’d been through those past two weeks would have killed him a long time ago, but the “St. John” was a well built machine. When he couldn’t breath arterial plugs kept oxygen moving through his veins, and when his heart couldn’t work under the sheer weight of its own tissue and fluids at six or seven gravities, an external pump ensured that all his major organs received the proper circulation. The arterial plugs felt like led weights beneath his skin under these kinds of pressures, and there were other plugs, other orifices that had gone from uncomfortable to sheer blinding agony a long time ago. The ship kept him alive, even when all he wanted to do was die. The ship kept him alive.

  The acceleration switched to deceleration and Samuel’s chair whipped back around with enough force to snap his spine, then the engines cut off and he was in blessed zero gravity. The hand compressing his throat released and he gulped down air in a reflexive gasp he’d grown used to by now. There was really no need to breath, with the machines plugged into his body, but like the ship, his body kept on trying to keep him alive, holding out the hope that somehow, some impossible way, he might still get out of this war alive. Dimly, he registered the cloud of shrapnel that shot by through the spot the “St. John” used to be, wreckage from the long battle, broken automata, shattered mothership fragments, all of it caught in wild elliptical orbits around the little moonlet among the stars. “A waste.” He thought. “A goddam waste.”

  The St. John’s launch tubes vomited out a fresh swarm of angels and archangels into that maelstrom. The engines of the swarm of automata lit as they left the tubes and the machines accelerated away at speeds that would have turned a human occupant to jelly. Up and around the cloud of space junk they went, arrowing towards the enemy fleet barely visible on the opposite side of the wreckage. A few of the little missile like craft rammed backwards through the debris to burn a path with their engines. Behind them, the red eye of Themis, the moon’s parent, a huge gas giant, watched impassively as the invaders automata tangled with the St. John’s, adding to the wreckage floating in orbit before they separated on their disparate trajectories.

  Samuel coughed as the command capsule maneuvered again, whipped around the backside of the St. John’s armored interior while the enemy’s automata made the assault. Laser turrets lashed out at the incoming craft and more angels shot out of launch tubes to engage them at superhuman speeds. As soon as Samuel became aware of the skirmish on his display it was over and others were beginning all across the field of battle too fast for the human eye to follow. Samuel struggled to care anymore.

  “Shields are failing.” The AI informed him. Not that there was anything he could do about it. Shields were only possible in a gravity field of some strength, and they were maneuvering away from the only one nearby. The moon. An airless, strip-mined, rocky waste, its defensive turrets useless and blinded by the cloud of debris that filled its sky. Its industrial facilities were equally useless, locked away here, millions of miles from Marain, denied to the defenders by distance and, more importantly, the Kamele corporation warships now doing their level best to kill him.

  There were people down there still. Even after the evacuation weeks before, a small population of the old factory overseers had decided to stay. They had been as pointless to the moonlets automated manufacturing as he was to the St. John’s war efforts in space, and yet, for them the moon was home. When Samuel and the other captains told them it was time to leave, they refused. A polite refusal, pleasant even, but now they would be consigned to the same fate as Samuel.

  Samuel grit his teeth as the couch made another gut wrenching flip and he felt his rib cage pushing against the forcefield projected across his tortured insides. That would be dying too if they went much farther. Then only God knew how long he’d last. His body was almost completely destroyed. His head was pounding and his stomach was roaring and they were whipping around again to dodge something he couldn’t have seen if he wanted to. He’d been in the couch for two straight weeks. He hadn’t moved or eaten, or cleaned himself for two weeks while this machine kept him alive and he watched the other three evangelists turned to orbital dust. It was probably one of them the ship had just dodged, the St Luke or the St. Mark. Two weeks of fighting. He was sure there would be lasting damage to his body, something permanent and embarrassing, something that would make life very difficult
when he made it home… if he made it home. He felt hot tears forced from his eyes by renewed acceleration as the seat shot sideways on its swivel again. His bitch of an aunt would probably still call him lazy if he couldn’t walk after all this.

  There had been plans for more ships, three years ago, before they called them the evangelists, when it became clear that Marain and the Quinn Corporation would be facing a Kamele invasion. There had been plans for six then, until someone decided to divert some of the lunar manufacturing capacity to planetary defenses. Cherub rockets, a platform and formations of archangels to provide a last line of defense after the evangelists went down. After, not if. No one had told him they expected him to die. No one had told him he wasn’t necessary up here either. The ships had been magnificent things when they were presented to the dynasties at the Quinn estate. The kind of thing he’d dreamed of flying when he was a child. Huge cones of guns and launch tubes, craft the size of cities, bristling with death and capable of moving at fantastic speeds. By the end they were just another cloud of shrapnel clogging up the lower orbits of the moon, or in the case of the St. Matthew, a huge black scar across the planet’s surface.

  The last broadcast of the St. Matthew’s captain had been choppy amidst the swarm of debris already obscuring the orbit in those first days of fighting. “Give them hell.” He’d said. If he ordered the ship’s sensors now Samuel was sure he could see the scar even through the cloud of debris and the bloom of exploding munitions, a massive black mark amidst the pucker of gun emplacements that had long ago stopped firing as the fields of broken machines and dead munitions around the moon thickened.

  A second wave of shrapnel flew towards the St. John, this one coming in the opposite direction to the one they’d dodged. The St. John lurched as emergency reaction armor turned suddenly liquid and blew out into space between them and the cloud. Scrap moving at speeds near or above the speed of sound blew apart as they hit the liquid barrier while other chunks of dead spaceship hammered against the flickering shield and the outside of the ship like hail on the tin roof of the shanty town where the captains had met during their last day on Marain. The day before they embarked on the shuttles that would take them to the drydock and the four evangelists waiting around the moon.

  “We all know that this is a suicide mission.” One of the captains said as the rain fell. They sat around a small cheap wooden table and studied the drinks in front of them while the captain that had spoken surveyed each man in turn. Yammaro was his name, captain of the St. Matthew, A priest, some said, who’d lost his frock for some crime or another and saw this as his chance at redemption. He looked the way Samuel imagined a priest might look without a frock. Always frowning. Not that he had any experience with priests, but he’d romanced a religious girl, once, sixteen and prettier than a sunrise, as stiff in the neck as a metal rod.

  “Now hold on just a minute.” Samuel had protested. “There’s a good goddam chance we get out of this kind of thing alive. Those aren’t row boats waiting for us up there, and we’re not just plannin on spitting at them. It’s not as though they’ll just be able to walk over us.”

  Yammaro looked at the others gathered around the table. Captain Atomsqe, a square jawed man with a shy smile, supposedly one of the Kidawa dynasty men, a much larger dynasty than Samuel’s family but not one he had any relations in. Captain Gerald didn’t meet his eyes. He was the captain of the St. Luke and the first of them to die. His was the only ship tasked to defending the home planet and he met the invaders in deep space between the Themis and Marain where he lost his life in an effort to reinforce their defence of the lunar manufactories no one expected them to hold.

  “You all know that this war isn’t being fought by men.” Yammaro said. “It’s being fought by machines. AI don’t fight wars the way you and I do. They fight it with numbers, calculations. They fight by figuring out all the possible outcomes of a battle, the next three years, the next three months, the next three days, the next three seconds, and figuring out what the best allocation of force or resources is to guarantee the desired outcome. All it needs is raw data, and the Kamele, well they’ve got raw data, and they’ve got AI too. You can be sure they’ll know exactly how many ships we can field, as a maximum, and plan accordingly. They’re going to bring enough to kill us. You can be assured, elsewise why come? You can bet the up and ups know that. It’s why a few of us were volunteered for the job in the first place.”

  Samuel looked to the others for confirmation. Neither made eye contact. Atomsqe actually stood up and turned his back to them, taking his cup to the small open window that looked out of the shack into the muddy street beyond, rapidly turning into a tributary of the Mighty River under the heavy rain. “That can’t be.” Samuel said. “Why send us if they know we’re gonna die?” Even as he asked the question he could see the sense in it. A means of honorable disposal for three unwanted men, and, and…

  “You’re the youngest in your line aren’t you.” Atomsqe barked from the window. “A trouble maker too. Hmm?” The man turned and surveyed Samuel as he took a sip from his drink.

  “Why not let AI do the fighting then?” Samuel asked. “What have you ever done that someone would want you dead?”

  Atomsqe didn’t reply and Yammaro reached for the jug in the center of the table and poured, first for himself, then for Samuel. “It’s not dying I’m afraid of.” The ex-priest said. He had dark serious eyes under a widow’s peak of white hair that made his skin seem black by comparison despite his caucasian ancestry. Those eyes bored into Samuel as he offered him his drink. “Not so long as it’s for a friend.”

  Samuel accepted the drink and looked down at it for his reflection, a shadow there, against the electric light that shivered above them in the rumble of the rain. “I don’t understand.”

  “When things go wrong in a fight AI don’t make new strategies.” Gerald said. He held out his cup for Yammaro to refill and sipped at the liquor with a grimace. “That’s the only way a person ever beats a computer at chess, by turning the game against them. Playing to lose, and finding a way to win.”

  “We’re not going up so that we can come back.” Yammaro said.

  Samuel held the man’s gaze, the drink in his hand forgotten. “No one said.” He whispered.

  Now he was the last. The last of the four evangelists.

  “Orbital debris is now too thick to make defense tenable.” The St John AI told Samuel as he squeezed his eyes shut in an attempt to stem the acceleration tears. At high G they could bruise his cheeks, as he’d discovered after each death. His head pounded, and he could feel the support force fields in his guts beginning to flicker, like a mild panic attack snapping on and off as the ship’s singularity chamber tried to warp space time inside his body without the support of a planet’s gravity well to feed the structures it generated. “We can no longer effectively defend the moon.”

  Samuel knew what that meant. “Take us out.” He said. “Full speed, if you please, without blowing us against the debris.” More tears forced themselves through Samuel’s eyelids as the ship accelerated again. They felt like beads of molten led as they coursed down his cheeks under the force of the engines. He hadn’t asked for this, not for all this. He was tired, so tired, and his body hurt in ways he hadn’t imagined it could. He was fairly certain that the weight he felt near his anus was from fecal matter bruising the inside of his intestine under the brutal two weeks of off and on acceleration. The ship fed him through the arterial plugs, but that didn’t mean his body was empty. It was probably the remains of his last meal. He hoped he wouldn’t need prosthetics anywhere… inside… after…

  It was all his aunt’s fault, that bitch! Ever since he put the slug in her hat when he was twelve she’d been calling him the unwanted child of the family, trying to get him into positions that sent him to the black coast, or the tidal fields or the pampas, or anywhere but where he would be “causing trouble” for the family’s fortunes amongst high society. Sure he’d never done anythin
g to change her opinion, but he’d never done anything to deserve this, to be manipulated into this. Used. She’d said, hadn’t she, how “proud she was” to have a Karamaz on one of the evangelists. “Like our own admiral Nelson.” She said. Playing to lose.

  “There can be no cowards among us.” Yammaro said as thunder rumbled beyond the roof of their shanty out amongst the mountains of the Mighty River basin. “And the best way is to know what we face ahead of time, you can be assured. There can be no running away, no turning to the other side, no selling out. We are brothers now.” He held his cup up in a toast as the rest did the same. “Let’s give them hell.”

  The St. John cleared the debris field and Samuel heard the AI inform him that the shields had failed. They were in the dead zone, with nothing between them and the enemy, a china cup facing down seven men with hammers, seven Kamele warships now visible as they too rose above the cloud of debris. Seven where once there had been nine.

  “Fire everything.” Samuel choked to the AI when his throat recovered from the acceleration.”Full offensive.” Then he felt the ship shudder as the AI turned his command into action. Automata shot towards two of the closest ships. Ships still struggling to rebuild a defensive line of automated craft weakened by the onslaught of the long war’s debris. “Give me the moon’s fire control.” He added. He was looking to do better than even the score. He had one last secret weapon for that.

  When they’d arrived at Themis’s moon, now almost a month ago, the last of the moonlet’s staff had met them at the drydocks. They wanted to christen the ships they’d overseen constructed. To give them a blessing, “for good luck”, before the captains boarded and took up their defensive stations ahead of the Kamele fleet. They’d given a dinner, and there had been a girl there too, as there always was. She’d called him “our defender” that night, and walked with him to the ship when he embarked. She was going to die now, like all the rest.