"Faraday him."
Thale's eyes snapped open moments before the cage came down. Three dark figures around the bed were crouched low and held subtech weapons – knives, clubs, snub nosed stubguns, their boots. The one holding the cage slammed it down, the fibermesh mask snapping tight around his nose, his ears, his mouth. Thale felt the pressure of it against his face, the muffling
whump
of his nostrils pressing completely to the solid, laytex like fiber.
"Cinch it! Now!" One of the men snarled, while another planted the stubpistol into Thale's stomach.
He pulled the trigger.
The hammer snapped down on the fleshy join of thumb and pointer finger as Thale jammed his hand into the mechanism. The gunman hissed behind his mask, but then Thale brought his head upwards. He took advantage of the Faraday cage wrapped around his head to smash his face into the man with the knife's face. The mask he wore crunched and he stumbled backwards with a muffled grunt. Thale's claws sprang from his fingertips and he leaped off the bed, slashing with his hand. The man with the club caught his claws on that and the club went whistling off into the dark. It cracked into the window that looked out over Eudaimonia's cityscape.
Thale's eyes could only see faint shapes through the mesh.
The man with the pistol lifted it up, snarling.
Thale snapped out his hand. The clavegun that was hidden in the wall above the Emperor's bed fired through the thin material. The massive, explosive slugs caught the assassin in the back. His shoulder blew apart and his head turned into a fine red mist. The other assassins sprang for cover, one shouting: "What the fuck!?"
Thale pointed with his finger, stitching a line of explosive death across the floor. But one of the men had leaped behind the imperial dresser – made, like so much of Rehoboam's old stuff, out of material denser than some planetary cores. The clave rounds impacted and burst on the surface like tiny supernovae.
Thale felt his lungs burn.
The assassin with the knife darted from cover and Thale snapped his finger to him, but the man leaped behind Thale. The clavegun let out a whining bleating noise as it tried to target a firing solution through his body. Thale spun and blocked the knife thrust at his throat with his forearm, knocking the assassins' arm aside. He thrust out with his own claws, burying them in the man's stomach. Their fiber armor gave, but he didn't scream and Thale didn't feel blood.
The knife, again, whistled at Thale's face. Thale jerked his head back, then caught the assassin's wrist. With muscles burning and heart hammering, he shoved and bent the arm backwards, driving the blade into a seam between mask and throat. Then, pivoting, he tossed the assassin at his fellow, who had emerged nowt hat the clavegun wasn't currently hammering away. The two went down in a pile of limbs. Thale grabbed at his mask, trying to work his claws in. His vision began to waver and fade as he felt the material stretching around his claws. He tugged and the mask drew back – but the added space had no air to breathe in it. He fell to his knees, his hands tightening and tugging more.
The assassin with the club stood. He had the pistol.
The door to the room bust open and a blazing, red bolt of light cut across Thale's vision. Several thumps followed and the red light flashed again and Thale felt fresh air explode into his face. The Faraday cage came apart and he gasped in breath. Sparks exploded before his eyes and when they cleared, he saw that Adoran and Enriquah stood before him. Enriquah held her twin bladed threshold staff in her hands and was beaming at Thale.
"Did they really think that'd work?" she asked, laughing. "A Faraday cage? Pfffttbbth!" She waved her hand.
Thale, his hand going to his throat, continued to breathe heavily. His head
pounded
and his tongue felt thick and fat in his mouth. His lips were numb too. He blinked up at Quah, who waved her hand and flipped her hair dismissively. "As if powers that reach across spacetime and make physics their bitch would be stopped by a bit of chicken coop and, what's this, nanomesh?" She snorted. "And it's not even top of the line-"
"Quah," Adoran said, his arm having slid around Thale's shoulder, allowing Thale to rest his head on his shoulder.
"-honestly, I'm shocked they went subtech with their weapons. If they were
this
ignorant, I'm shocked they didn't come in power armor!" Quah giggled and shook her head. "What a bunch of useless assassins."
"Quah!" Adoran said, louder now.
Enriquah turned to face the two of them. She leaned forward, and seemed to finally register that Thale was still shivering and gasping quietly. "...oh, right, suffocation is a little stressful," she said, nodding.
"Yes, Quah," Thale snarled. "Being
strangled
to death
is
a
little
stressful."
He stood, slipping from Adoran's arms, but allowing his hand to find its way to the big prince's hand, squeezing him. Adoran stood, so that the two would keep holding hands as Thale stepped over to the pile of assassins. The one he'd hit with the clavegun was little more than a lower torso. Red matter was spread all across the upholstery and splashed onto the walls and even the ceiling. A single hand had been left intact, but its fingers had been forced apart so his comrade could get at the stubgun. The one Quah had sliced up had been left in nearly as many pieces, thanks to the monowire of a threshold blade's edge.
But the one Thale had stabbed was still intact. Enough that he was able to yank off the mask and glare into his eyes. He reached into the Imperial registry with his mind and skimmed through it – finding the man's name and identification number before the door opened and his 'royal' guard entered. They were Darkstar and Antaras – Thale had learned the names of every Alliance Marine that Meetra had entrusted to his direct command. Enriquah had outdone herself in inventing a fictitious records for each of the Alliance marines, records notable enough that their assignment to guard the Regent was not going to raise any eyebrows.
That was one advantage of the size of the Hegemonic military. New soldiers were hardly noticed.
Darkstar kicked at one of the corpses, his power armor whirring softly. "How the
fuck
did they get in here?"
"That's what I want to know," Thale murmured. "This man is posted to a ship on the Far Watch Fleet. The
San Diego
." He frowned, slightly.
"That's not a standard Hegemonic name," Antaras said, his face-plate hissing back to look Thale in the eyes. "Where's it from?"
Adoran, his face set in a frown, spoke up first: "It's a black ship. The Hegemony rechristens any ship that kills a planet with a name from a Home city that was destroyed. San Diego...that's one of the nuked ones, wasn't it?"
"No, that's Hiroshima and Nagasaki," Quah said, her hair writhing. "San Diego was hit by an antimatter bomb."
"Oh, well, I stand corrected," Adoran said, rolling his eyes.
Thale shook his head. "This subtech equipment is Hegemonic black ops gear, for anti-Liminal duties. Most of this stuff isn't even mothballed. They must have fabbed it up special for them." He touched the chest plate. "This armor has magnetic repulsors that are designed to disrupt a threshold blade."
Quah whistled cheerfully as she started to twirl her staff around in her wrist.
"I never said they disrupted it
well
," Thale said, then stood. "Lets call a council to talk about this." He looked back down at the corpses, then sighed. "And...I think I'm going to start sleeping in the Liminal Knights barracks again, protocol be damned."
Adoran grinned and let his eyes sparkle. Quah was considerably less restrained. She threw her arms into the air. "Yippie!"
***
Ever since the death of the Emperor and the destruction of his gene-bank, the Hegemony had been operating under the regency of Drak Thale. As the one of the sole survivors of the attack
and
a relatively famous Liminal Knight, the population of Eudaimonia had reacted the same way they would have if Emperor Rehoboam had simply been killed and replaced with his clone-son: By engaging in the week long mourning celebrations, then returning to their day jobs. The upper echelon had been trickier. Thale still remembered demonstrating his right to rule through the most expedient means possible during the first meeting with the admiralty.
Admiral Johnstone had demanded: "By what right does this masked freak have to give us orders. We don't even know if he's
human
behind that mask!"
Thale had stood. Walked around the table.
Then thrown Admiral Johnstone through the smart-window, which had flashed into vapor on a single mental command. Johnstone had struck the slanted roof that led away from the meeting chambers to the three kilometer drop straight down to the foundry pits that ringed the admiralty tower. Thale had sprung onto the window sill and waved his hand – popping out a vent-vane out just in time for Johnstone to grab onto it with his fingernails.
Johnstone had quickly pledged his fealty then and there.
Fascism had that one advantage. In the end, the protocol, the history, the pompous chest beating, the justifications and the rationals, all of it boiled down to one brutal fact: He who could, did. But Thale was not so foolish as to think he had won anything but a deferment of the coup – in effect, Johnstone had simply pushed it from his inept hands to someone on the admiralty who knew how to
lie
. Which was why Admiral Johnstone had, two weeks later, been replaced by the new up and coming Admiral Metara – who had a remarkable string of victories in her record and plenty of loyalty to the Regent. She had then ingratiated herself to several other Admirals, who showed a worrying disloyalty to the Regent.
Those Admirals had been a mixture of people who believed, earnestly, in the Hegemonic party line of protecting humanity from the chaos and disorder of a Chain without guidance, and petty tyrants who wanted to grind anyone who wasn't blond and blue eyed under their heel.
The latter had been uniformly found guilty and sentenced to death.
The former?
The former were sitting around the meeting room table, with Admiral "Metara" at the head. Meetra grinned wryly at Thale. "Did Lady Venn reach Home?"
"Not yet," Thale said, his stomach knotting. He walked into the chambers flanked by Adoran and Enriquah. Enriquah was adjusting her skin colors with a thought, making her look like a poorly done visual effect. Thale took his seat at the table and rubbed his throat.
"What's wrong?" Admiral Karak asked, his brow furrowing. He had, until Johnestone's unfortunate trip down an elevator shaft, been the youngest of the admirals, and was still the one who was most prone to speaking his mind.
"Several assassins from the Far Watch fleet tried to kill me tonight," Thale said, frowning slightly. "They had subtech weapons and armor and what they believed would be a game winner: A Faraday cage." He shook his head, his tail lashing from side to side behind him – the only clue to his lingering nerves. "But my question is how the hell they got to Eudamonia?"
