Chapter 110: Standoff

  Jack didn't have to fight anymore.

  Principle knew how, but Ellie and Chloe and Rudy Algreil had apparently scored the assistance of the Divine Auric Drake, gotten past the Animus Hunter Corps, won over President Ferrill. No way – not after a speech like that – those toadies in the Federal Senators would risk their seats by refusing the Victor's Boon.

  It was too good to be true.

  Which was probably why, Jack thought, it wasn't true.

  He didn't have to fight anymore, but standing on the bridge of an Oligarchical battleship in a firefight with the Fed Navy, he had no way to stop.

  “It's nice of you to finally stop going after my good buddy Jack, here,” Otto said to the five figures staring up at his projected image, “but the question's about to become academic anyway.”

  “Algreil,” Ferrill growled. Avalon shifted between her and the screen like he expected Otto to reach out of it and wring the president's neck. Which, considering Otto's apparent control over Etemenos’s systems, might not be out of the question.

  “Miz President,” Otto said.

  “You are making a grave miscalculation,” Ferrill said. “You should have run when you had the chance.”

  “Why?” The oligarch's grin widened. With a wave of his hand he split the screen to show off what he and Jack and the Pacific Resolution's bridge crew were seeing.

  The Federal Navy's First Fleet held, barely, a ring around Etemenos's core. Dozens of capital ships had fallen when their shields dropped to the initial, viral Oligarchical attack, but a ragtag core had formed around the battlecruiser Emancipator. They would have been wiped out if they hadn't switched to manual control of their shields. They would have been wiped out anyway if the Second, Third and Fourth Fleets, unhindered by the virus, had not emerged from hiding around the fifth ring to pincer the Oligarchy's fleet.

  Otto hadn't expected that one.

  But he'd dealt with it.

  Etemenos offered too many great vantage points for Otto to wage war from. He was too good of a tactician, with too powerful a force, with too little to lose, to be defeated even by more than four times the Feds he'd expected to face. Otto had laughed when Second Fleet's Acting Admiral Little demanded his surrender.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The destroyer Reformer's listing hulk was a testament to who had been right.

  “Impossible,” Errard Zelph snarled.

  “Errard,” Ferril said, “you told me his plan relied –”

  “On the good senators you've got under arrest, whose transmissions you've been jamming?” Otto cocked his head. “Oh, sorry, Miz President, Grand Admiral. I guess I must have misrepresented what those fools were actually needed for.”

  Zelph glared up at the screen. “How could you lie to me?”

  “Not that hard,” Otto said. “I never gave you a reason to wrench my secrets out of me, and I let Alarie finalize the plans for disabling the First Fleet. Until today, neither her father nor I knew about her people inserting a virus into the fleet's systems during their joint 'exercises.'”

  “They were good plans,” Alarie said. “Weren't they, Otto?”

  “They seem to be working like a charm, babe,” Otto said. “Of course, why would our friendly neighborhood Animus Hunter have guessed you were even involved? Everyone knows how little I think of you, right? We spent ten years showing them.”

  “Not anymore.” She beamed at him.

  “The only thing I needed the senators for,” Otto said, “was to make this a bloodless transition of power. After all, I do hate to lose customers.”

  As if to punctuate his words, the Pacific Resolution's main gun, a gigantic magnetic acceleration cannon bigger than half the capital ships Jack had seen, caromed a shell through the shields of one of First Fleet's screening ships. The smaller vessel crumpled, but the shell's momentum punched out the other side and into Etemenos's core.

  Jack couldn't hear the impact through the vacuum, of course.

  He couldn't hear the people caught on the edges of it. Screaming. Dying.

  Ellie was almost certainly somewhere in the core. He knew Chloe was at its heart, where Otto would have to carve his way if the Senate kept fighting.

  Every second that passed, a Fed or 'garch shell smashed into some hapless part of the world-city. This deep inside it, they literally couldn't miss.

  Jack itched to stop the oligarch, even though he knew he'd fail. His first instinct was to get his ass kicked trying. At least then he could look at himself in the mirror afterward, assuming there was an afterward.

  And yet...

  For all Otto was a bastard, for all that Jack's personal part in the second Civil War should have ended when Avalon asked for his and Chloe's pardons, on some level, Otto wasn't wrong. Jack didn't understand why the Senate had come after Chloe in the first place, but they had. He didn't know why they'd orchestrated the death of Chloe's birth mother, but they had. He didn't know why they'd broken their own rules to provoke the Oligarchy.

  But they had.

  Jack wanted the fighting to stop.

  But he'd be damned if he knew who he thought deserved to win.