THE GUARDSMAN: Book 1: Honor of the Fallen – Chapters 23-25

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The Guardsman, Book 1: Honor of the Fallen:

Chapter 23)

Samson simultaneously scanned his thumb and identity to key entry to Tomposo Investigations and was not particularly looking forward to a day at work. He was on time, but unlike all his days prior everyone was seated at their desks before him. The business’s collective break from the routine where he was first to arrive and everyone else arrived later was disconcerting.

It put him on his guard immediately.

He stepped through the door, as his right thumb pressed down on the twist of his overcoat’s belt. His left eyebrow arched as he looked left and right at the assembled faces. All of them were staring at him.

The door slipped shut behind him, as the boss poked his head out from his office, “Smith! Where the hell have you been? What is the status of the location assignment I gave you weeks ago?! You reported you were done, and you disappeared for two days!” The fat man trembled with fury as he closed the distance.

Samson pulled his comm out of his pocket and tapped several keys that took him into his sent messages. Finding what he was looking for, he said, “Subject: Investigation 721, delivered your comm, looks like fifty-two and a half hours ago.” He noticed, “As yet the report status is listed as ‘unread’. Do you need me to resend it?”

Ignoring facts Tomposo snapped, “Go to hell, you stiff-backed bastard! You still didn’t answer my question. Why the hell are you late and where have you been!?”

Samson felt his teeth rattle and his hackles raising, as he ground out, “I answered your most pertinent question first. The other is good news and relates to new agency business and I didn’t think you would want to transact it out here, in front of five other detectives in your employ.”

His infuriated boss trembled with rage, at the challenge and his corpulent flesh trembled in time in opposite directions, as he lashed out, “Smith, you are an insubordinate piece of shit! Answer my question, John Smith! I see you must have earned that name! How you can maintain such an arrogant swagger about yourself is beyond me. I bet it is first generation and that nameless taint rests squarely on you. You stiff son of a bitch!” Tomposo’s middle three fingers struck Samson’s chest and stabbed into the muscle.

All pretense of work at the surrounding desks stopped in the same instant.

The death knell of toil was the unmistakable high-pitched ring of a freshly drawn blade.

It was the horrific sound of death in the hands of a master.

Samson did not even realize he had drawn until he felt the tension on his face twitch his cheek muscle in three angry ticks. The sound of the blade spoke to the primal survival core that lay buried in the instincts of every human. The shining light reflected from the blade as it lifted the man’s chin ever so slightly as it rested along his neck and under his jawline.

Samson leaned in close and calmly spoke, “Looks like you were right, but my back works just fine now. I seem to have removed what was making it stiff.”

The boss’s hands dropped limp and forgotten at his sides.

John’s co-workers had not said a thing.

None had moved since the confrontation began. His coworkers considered John Smith too arrogant and condescending to be worthy of their trust, confidence, friendship or even the assistance normally granted to a new employee and coworker. They now added abject fear to their previously ambivalent emotions. None of them imagined that he carried a sword everywhere he went or that he knew how to use it.

Samson was now in a dilemma.

Samson had drawn his blade in anger. He also belatedly remembered his decision to behave better with his coworkers and boss. He also still needed the fat man and his crappy little company to approve the expenses and justify his time on the partner accounting sheets.

Since he had his inner monologue about his own hypocrisy two nights before, he could not now justify taking his anger out on any of these people.

Mister Tomposo was as justified in his anger as Samson was in his.

Samson realized that he should have directed his anger at himself, where it belonged.

The solution presented itself in the form of a common cockroach.

Samson spoke distractedly, changing the subject, “Thousands of years of star travel, and yet the Terraforming Commission still feels the burning need to import every pest bug, and irritation from Old Earth, onto every habitable world they produce.”

Now his coworkers added a new accolade to ‘John Smith’s’ list of failings. He was apparently bat-shit crazy too.

His eyes flicked up to the scurrying pest as it darted between light fixtures. The obese shorter man tried to follow John’s eyes but could neither track as fast nor could he roll his head back far enough to see while the blade was in the way.

With profound detachment, Samson spoke clearly and calmly, “Do not move fat man.”

The other trembled as he spoke, “I was not…”

Samson floating in calm reminded “Quiet. You were thinking about it; I could see it in your eyes.” The blade shifted ever so slightly, rolling from its keen edge to its silver flat along the corpulent neck.

The roach began to dart from its hiding place, safe behind a fixture to the next fixture’s ceiling mount.

The blade thumped into the cheap ceiling panel. The sting from the triple-hinged scorpion’s tail that connected the tip of the blade back to Samson’s shoulder, pulled free of the ceiling panel, ever so slowly.

Samson switched the blade to his left hand in a standard grip and lowered his trophy to eye level, “I hate these things.”

The fat brown cockroach fluttered its sliced wings and kicked its legs furiously suspended between Samson, and the man, who up until that moment had considered himself the lord of all he surveyed, in their zillionth of the world. Samson pontificated on tradition, “You’re lucky. Tradition requires that I draw blood if I draw in anger, and I do not like cutting myself.”

Samson waved his right index finger indicating his desire for more personal space. “You can watch if it pleases you, or you can wait in your office,” Samson smoothly switched from left hand back to a right-hand standard grip, this time away from his typical reverse grip draw. With two fingers from his left hand, he waved a second dismissive gesture, “Either way, step back behind that desk, so I can dispose of this creature.”

The ones who blinked missed it.

With a simple flick of his wrist, the scavenger sloughed off his blade, into the air, and struck the ceiling panel directly over his head, with a dull hollow tick sound. His right wrist rolled inward and pulled the blade, in a blink of reflected light, across his body. The ruptured brown mass of flailing legs and wings did not have time to finish its descent, from bouncing off the ceiling to the floor.

The popping carapace of the roach made the sound distinct to that species when it was crushed under the heel, only compressed into a violent instant wet pop. One soft wet ‘tick’ sound echoed in the room, followed by another tick sound a second later, as the ‘other half’ of the roach landed somewhere else in the room.

Samson looked at his desk for his box of tissues or a paper and found that someone had finished his and left the box empty on his desk. Samson grumbled to himself absently, “I really hate those things,” as he pulled a tissue from a box on the nearest desk and wiped the disgusting guts off the blade and point of his sword.

Someone whimpered, “John, um John, is that blade sharp?”

Samson could not even remember hearing the man speak in his presence. After all the time there, Samson did not even know his name.

Samson balled the tissue with the roach guts and dropped it in the nearest bin, before looking at the man who had never said a word to him before that question. Samson pulled another tissue, held it as straight as he could between two sets of pinching fingers on his left hand, turned to the man, draped the tissue along the blade, from hilt to point, and set two clean-cut pieces of tissue onto the man’s desk. “Yes, it’s sharp.”

One of his tormenting coworkers asked, “Sir, where did you learn to do that?”

Samson looked at another man who had never spoken to him before, but in the past had often amused himself at ‘John Smith’s’ expense. “I had too much time on my hands as a kid,” with a flourish of the wrist, the blade flipped, and disappeared into his back scabbard.

He walked into the boss’s office without another word and sat in one of the chairs facing the desk and waited. Finally, his boss joined him. Samson produced the folded list of expenses from his pocket, the one signed by the noble brat, a little less than a day before.

John informed Tomposo, “I was asked to help on a private security contract. Here is a list of my expenses, corporate noble-brat’s signature, and all. He’s some C-suite kid, son of someone or another. The payment was one coin, ten – ‘K’ denomination. Expenses ran just under nine – ‘K’ including my time. You got just over a thousand credits for my time yesterday. When can I expect repayment of expenses?”

The boss worked his mouth, but it was out of sequence with the words his brain was trying to form. The absurdly large amount of payment for the single day’s assignment tumbled through the other man’s head. Samson’s calm request for expenses was almost anticlimactic, “Uub, I ah, um, now! I will pay them now!”

Samson responded, “Good I was hoping you would say that. I may be asked to handle similar contracts in the near future. I do not know when, but they will probably fall out of the sky, like this last one.”

Tomposo admitted, “John! You know I bring home less than two hundred fifty a week from this place right!?”

Perplexed at the unsolicited offer, Samson stated directly, “No, not really. It was never any of my business, so I never asked. You never told me nor had any reason to tell me. Why?”

Tomposo was clearly not understanding, and asked with a conspiratorial note in his voice, “Because this is a phenomenal amount of money you just gave me! Why didn’t you just disappear and take it for yourself?”

Samson couldn’t miss the opportunity for some of his dark humor, “I could not do that, sir. That would be no fun at all! I would hate to actually live up to the name of the damned that I carry.” Changing subjects, John asked, “What’s the next assignment boss?”

“Mario… My name is Mario. I think you can call me Mario Tomposo now. Let me see what I have for you.” He frantically shoved folders and assignment packets looking for the good ones he had seen over the last few days.

Chapter 24)

Samson Rockpoint was not happy about his latest assignment.

Samson had spent ten years where a Guardsman belonged, on the front, defending commanders and slaughtering enemy troops. He was not some Home Guard enlisted troop looking for a cushy posting.

At least any idiot with any time in combat here could look at him and tell by his armor he was no common soldier and that he was not a flabby overweight palace ‘rent-a-cop’. Veterans and the very observant would notice the repair notches and the translucent ‘shifts’ in the enameling of his armor, from sealed pitting, and blasts that the suit’s nanos had repaired. The arms and legs were new, but even those repairs could be seen as jagged cuts, followed by new material.

His centurion-cropped hair did nothing to hide the cross-hatched pattern of the replacement skin the repair shop had grown along the back of his neck, spine, and base of his skull. He had lost his own when his armor had failed to protect him from the third-degree radiant energy burns followed by particulate debris that had flayed the skin off down to the ligaments and bone. The same blast had ripped off his right arm above the elbow and below his right knee. Just to add insult to that injury, his left ankle took a piece of reinforcing rebar and concrete between the bones, just above the ankle. Since the steel and concrete had slipped between his Tibia and Fibula the mass of concrete and steel pinned him painfully to the ground and flipped him over backwards onto his severed limbs at the same time. He was lucky the contamination from the blast had not ruined his spine or he would have been a cripple for months as the medics rebuilt his spine.

That idiot Kazimir told Kiron to reset up the relay tower next to the command post.

Kiron had it right initially. He had run the wires to the tower over a kilometer away, down the valley, and to the opposite side of the hill into the next valley.

That way the enemy’s signals direction finding equipment could not track the source of the Brigade’s electronic signatures, and if they did triangulate, the position would be to the broadcast towers, not the headquarters. Kazimir had screwed all that up.

Samson was an angry man. A whole brigade headquarters section had been destroyed due to Kazimir’s blunder. They had been a Chroynos Empire contract auxiliary brigade, under Ground Forces Command Corporation personnel. They were empire troops, but not a permanent formation. Fortunately, they had not been free mercenaries or there would have been hell to pay. Kazimir had command of the rest of the Division. Kiron was placed in command of the independent brigade that was boosting his older brother’s division strength.

Kiron was an ass and a demanding taskmaster. But he knew his soldier skills cold. He learned them well during his years in the field. Samson had respected the man.

Samson got tired of listening to Kazimir calling to renew his argument with Kiron over the headquarters comm channel over and over again and asked to grab some food. The prick Kazimir made a scene before he left and would not let it drop after he finally did leave.

Samson had just put on his armor and stepped outside the bunker when the first missile landed.

The barrage included everything from time-delayed bunker busters to suit-killing cluster bombs, to incendiaries, including burning hot gasses and canisters of slimy, pooling, flaming goop. They all rained from the sky.

But all that hell followed immediately after the giant smart missile. The missile had followed the contours of the valley, below air defense levels, and had not only reached but cracked, the Brigade Headquarters’ bunker like an insect carapace.

Samson could still see that giant gray bullet on wings and fire whip around the hillside, to his front. It gave him just enough time for three hard running steps, on his augmented pulse and armor.

Samson learned that day that there is a point where physics and design specs collide. Usually, it results in ‘physics’ or ‘design specs’ winning. The conflicting principles would leave you alive in your armor or dead with holes in you. Very rarely the two forces met in a ‘tie’. When the physics of the concrete block and its protruding rebar struck his leg and pinned him firmly to the dirt, mid-stride, he was still trying to run. When it passed the rest of the way through his leg and pulled him back because the suit armor and bone wrapped the re-bar, it pinned him back into place. He remembered and felt himself falling forward, smashing into the ground, and bouncing back up. He fell back over the block as his upper body whipped forward, and then snapped back, falling over the jagged chunk of steel and concrete, while the artillery rained down.

It was either an explosive or anti-suit cluster bomb charge that ripped off his other leg and arm. But as he spent the months on his back forced to review events by the psych-comp in detail to ‘force his mental healing process’ he could never tell if his neck was hurt while he was still up ‘trying to run’ or after he had fallen backward over the chunk of concrete.

He was not even really sure when he lost his leg and arm. He was not really sure if his brain had not made it up out of the mash of shattered memories and psych-comp suggestions.

All he knew was he was one of only a handful of survivors, all of whom were scattered, disorganized, wounded, and mostly out of communication.

The rock did an interesting job of pooling the incendiary goop and channeling it away from him. Samson wondered for many weeks what things would have been like for him if he had landed face down instead of on his back and uphill. Face down, downhill, in the runnels of flaming goo, that is.

It still felt like his arm was not attached correctly. Like there was a ragged slice out of it between the new and old flesh and bone. His leg was not as bad, but that extremity was used more often. It felt like he ‘pressed’ the leg’s imaginary gap together between new and old flesh out of existence. The phantom pain was part of the annoying healing process.

Samson kept trying to heft the weight of his rifle as he stood weaponless in the assembled sea of strangers.

Samson trained his whole life in the Martial Arts, from sports at an early age, up to progressively harder, and more important physical competitions. His training culminated with full contact armed and unarmed combat competitions as part of his eighteen-hour school day’s graded activities. Like so many others who trained those skills, his training was designed to be defensive in nature, to defend and serve Commanders in the field, and the Noble houses, in times of conflict and at home. But he truly excelled when on the offensive, and solo.

Occasionally people would greet him with smiling faces and linger long enough to read the rows over rows over three more rows of combat citations, and campaign ribbons. After over two centuries of war fighting initially for the Chroynos Hegemony’s survival, and then expansion, he was hardly the first to serve. Unlike many peers, he had served consecutive combat deployments instead of rotating back to soft assignments. From graduation at eighteen he had shipped out to Home Guard combat training where he excelled as expected for a Guardsman and was deployed to one Genesis Warring world after another.

The difference between his combat service and the billions of others who passed through the military systems over the decades was that in his ten years, he had acquired twelve campaign ribbons and multiple citations for excelling in his combat duties. This was on top of the standard ‘thanks for coming’ awards militaries had bestowed for centuries uncounted.

Two campaigns he had ended by himself.

The first occurred during a small regimental fight on a worthless, slightly toxic, rock that did not terraform correctly and was slightly ‘mushy’ but contained abundant fusible material for capital ship munitions. Samson got tired of the scenery after three months not to mention the insanity of ‘sinking into the rocks’.

He was not really sinking into the rock. It had something to do with a step of the terraforming process not completing properly so the place had a soil that was like walking through freshly poured wet cement.

Something about the treatment bacteria not evolving properly for some reason.

Coincidentally, there was a stinking sting of sulfur everywhere as the sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid-laced soil corroded things.

So, he ran intelligence estimates of the opposing brigade defense in his head, based on what he had seen in the command post. He backward planned where he would have a put supply depot as the commander of that enemy defense, overlaid it all on a map, and left one night while off duty. He found what he was looking for, exactly where he thought it would be located. The next morning the enemy regiment was rocked by an enormous explosion and was trapped in a hostile and marginally toxic world with no munitions, food, water, and more importantly, only the air in their suits; they called to surrender. Samson accepted it before his commander could arrive. That act of insubordinate disrespect irritated the commander severely and resulted in a downgraded medal for valor. That was the first time he received the Empire’s ‘third highest’ citation.

The second campaign he ended by himself was a nasty division-size fight. It was his sixth or seventh tour and it turned out to be a brutal close-quarter’s jungle fight. The fight was in ridiculously mountainous but island terrain. The world was one of the rarities of terraforming that produced an abundance of water on a warm planet. But the fight was not over just water but over Deuterium water, which was fantastically plentiful in that world. Both sides had ground against one another for months in the jungles of the largest island, which was the only place large enough, and relatively flat enough, to land tiny supply freighters. Neither side controlled the skies, so reinforcements were sporadic and risky. Irritatingly, the primary commanders on both sides were highly and equally skilled. This resulted in a twisting, turning, confusing tangle of convoluted meeting engagements and ambushes that no one could make sense of before long. Overhead views were nearly useless; the jungle canopy was too thick to make the images worthwhile. Any recon vehicle up high was shot down almost instantly anyway, which was what made resupply so difficult. Anything low provides such a limited view that processing the information for combat formations took too long and made it a pointless exercise since a ground patrol could react faster and be present to counter the threat. The conflict might as well have been fought with clubs and spears, by the time forces saw each other.

Frustration caused veterans to snap at each other over the slightest provocations and staff members nearly came to fist fights in staff meetings. The troops were in worse shape. Most units had taken over thirty percent casualties and many companies existed only in the name on regimental rosters because those ravaged companies had been used to bring other companies up to combat strength. Junior leadership was having a particularly hard time surviving. Everyone tended to shoot at the guys yelling and pointing people into position. It was hard to miss them even if they were only throwing rocks at that range, not pellets of metal, hyper-accelerated to a substantial portion of light speed, or high explosive rounds.

The irritability had caught Samson too; he griped under his breath that he should just walk over to the other side and bring back the other commander’s head so they could be done with this stalemate world.

The commander, who was Samson’s responsibility to protect, had better hearing than Samson had discretion. He told Samson to not come back until he did just that or Samson should keep his mouth shut and let the commander run the war.

Samson took the first half of that as his orders.

The commander intended the second half as the order. The commander was none too pleased with Samson’s status as Missing in Action for over a standard week, but when Samson returned with the severed head of his opposite number, he dropped the Desertion charges he was sending up the Chain of Command and recommended another of the Ground Forces third highest citations.

The commander reasoned that there was no need to overly reward the insubordinate son of a bitch and encourage that type of behavior with any higher citation.

The charges would not have stuck to Samson anyway since the commander had given him the choice to collect the head of the opposition commander or close his mouth. The conversation giving him the choice of ‘collecting the head or closing his mouth’ was recorded in the Division’s black box meeting minutes and would have supported Samson in the judicial phase and severely embarrassed the commander.

The opposition folded with an unconditional surrender within two weeks of Samson’s return.

So, as Samson stood like a black and gold stone pillar in the center of the room that housed the seat of the Chroynos Corporate Empire’s power for the first time. He was something of an oddity and conversation piece for many passers-by. Very few people had as many stacked rows of citations as Samson.

A smiling and cloth uniform adorned Kazimir glided lightly through the crowd with an older man by his side and a mountain of a Guardsman behind them. Both nobles had drinks in their hands. “So, this is Samson, I see you didn’t escape without a scrape from that inferno that killed my boy, Kiron. I was reluctant to select you for this assignment because of your pathetic failure guarding my boy. Unfortunately, it was a combined lack of options and your availability; otherwise, I would have left you to rot.”

Samson answered flatly, “No, my Lord, I should have been killed too.” Samson replied to the man who was undoubtedly Thanatyos Chroynos. “I didn’t escape; the blast and following bombardment removed my right arm, and right leg, damaged my left leg, and took chunks out of my neck and spine. I had just left the bunker to get something to eat. I saw the missile coming in but didn’t have time to do anything but look up and take three steps before I was pinned.”

The massive Guardsman looked down his nose at him and Samson could see the muscle work over his jaw. Samson knew the man by reputation only. He was one of the fiercest Guardsmen the Academy ever produced. Guardsman Komnenos had arms bigger than Samson’s legs. He shunned the traditional Guardsman’s sword for an ax, of all weapons. It fit his reputed personality perfectly.

Thanatyos snapped, “That Independent Brigade Corporation was almost wiped out in the ground attack after that bombardment. An expensive screw-up! And my own boy died in it too! You were one of seven total survivors from that Headquarters Unit disaster.”

The elder turned, and Alexios Komnenos stepped to the side and allowed Thanatyos to slip back into the crowd. The younger lord followed his father after looking over Samson for a moment. Alexios remained to hold Samson’s eyes before following.

The elder asked quietly out of earshot for a normal person, “Will he do in his assigned post? We cannot afford any screw-ups. You know how important assigning the right individual to this posting is.”

Kazimir looked slightly over his shoulder as they retreated, Alexios was directly behind Thanatyos, “He’s a field soldier, but he’s not the same since that blast. He was there when I told Kiron he had the towers in the wrong place. But Kiron didn’t listen to me. He will serve fine.”

The old man droned, “And his charge? Will there be any issues there?”

Kazimir moaned dismissively, “No. That one is single and has no family he ever spoke of or visited. He spent the last ten years in combat and never took leave. He never went out or visited anyone. As soon as the campaigns ended, he always had his paperwork completed and was routinely routed to some other stinking hell hole. Since he always requested the worst assignments to fight on, his transfers were always expedited by the Personnel Division as quickly as his last assignments were cleared. He was always back-filling critical personnel shortages, so they moved him quickly. Your man Alexios here suggests that he is only interested in little boys…”

The father chuckled.

Samson was several years junior to Alexios but had not only attained Alexios’ rank but passed him by several grades. Alexios was still a Captain and eligible for Command of a Guardsmen Quick Reaction Platoon. Samson was a newly promoted Sub-Colonel. Higher-ranking Guardsmen tended to maintain their rank and status until they retired after many decades of honorable service. Lower-ranking Guardsmen were routinely deployed to combat tours in Quick Reaction Platoons where even with their enhanced survivability, many died violently. Or, the junior officers were recruited away by private placements, when their terms of service expired.

The rank structure was not a perfectly traditional pyramid but was a very steep and selective climb at the upper levels. Samson cracked the command ceiling early since he successfully served as a Guardsmen Company Commander, when as a Captain and senior surviving Platoon Leader the Company Commander was killed, and he successfully saved the company. He retained command and was promoted to the rank of Major in the field.

Alexios had more than Samson’s ten years of service and was still two grades junior to Samson. Samson did not look forward to dealing with that stubborn angry giant over the next few years of this tour.

He knew it would be at least three years before he could transfer back out to the line where he belonged. Thanatyos was in charge of Guardsmen and ‘charge’ pairing, as he called it. Kazimir was a jerk who now worked out of the Citadel and now Alexios literally had his particularly large ‘ax’ to grind with him over promotions. Samson knew he would hate this cushy rear-echelon assignment.

It reeked of politics, backstabbing, and sycophantic whining.

He already wanted to go out and shoot something!

During the shelling, his helmet had cracked and both ears had ruptured from the overpressure during the violent artillery shelling compressing the atmosphere. The sticky bloody mess left him only feeling the massive ‘whumping’ overpressure from each round.

None of those three men knew that Samson’s hearing had been rebuilt too. He had not mentioned it as an injury: it was relatively minor after all. His hearing was better than new. He was not having trouble hearing.

Samson was having trouble sorting individual conversations out of the crowd, and that was why he was standing in the middle of the room to practice his newfound skill.

He heard every derisive word as if they were standing next to him and not walking away into the swirl of reception guests.

Chapter 25)

Phyllip roared as he burst out of his office, “Take this impertinent child to the women’s locker room! Find the poor maid whose uniform she stole! Have her offer a sincere apology to her for the inconvenience she caused the poor woman and her family, and make her promise to do the woman’s laundry for a month… No! The woman is to bring all of her family’s laundry. My daughter will be performing laundry services to repay her audacity and for inconveniencing the woman.

He snapped, “I have her anti-grav harness here.” Phyllip shook the offending item in Persephone’s Guardsmen’s faces. “When she finishes her initial reparations to the maid in question, she will return to her room, and you will lock her bathroom window, and make sure she takes a shower! I want the filth scrubbed off her immediately! I’m going to personally inspect her room while you hold her outside! And if either one of you idiots loses her again, I do not want to see your faces here until you find her!” Phyllip tossed his chastened daughter’s travel bag into the face of one of her Guardsman, “And sent Thomys! My VP has a new part to play in all this mess too!” He promptly pulled the automatic door off its track-mounted slide and slammed the door closed in the Guardsmen’s faces as his back signaled the end of instruction. The door mechanicals whooshed closed behind him, clicking the door back into place and reestablishing its automatic function.

Her head down, Persephone trudged silently behind her two Guardsmen to exit her father’s office suite.

Phyllip’s own guards cracked the door and slowly filtered back into the agitated Emperor’s private office. Persephone heard him yell at them through the newly reopened office door, “When Thomys gets here I’m kicking you all out again!” The door closed before she could hear the rest of her father’s tirade.

Persephone was led like a whipped dog through the corridors of the Imperial Citadel. Down levels, turning at halls, into corridors, over walkways, down steps, into the lower reaches of the structure where the administrative and support functions were housed.

The Administrative Centers served a function, in the great scheme of life in the Citadel. It provided for the care, and security checks, associated with maintaining the staff that maintained the Citadel. There were offices lower in the building that administered the rest of the Empire.

It was technically a separate division of the Empire’s Intelligence Services, which operated solely as an extension of the Empire’s CEO, and Vice President, and was forbidden contact with outside agencies other than for initial employment background checks. Once inside the Intelligence/Security agency’s purview employees were retained indefinitely and monitored independent of any possible outside tampering. Even the Intelligence service agents who served in three-year tours were randomly selected from the larger intelligence service, based on grade for grade equivalent positions, and the posting was a once in a career assignment.

The result was a system that turned over a third of its workforce every year but was smaller, closer to the crown, and an excellent career move that typically resulted in individual promotions for alumni. Failures tended to disappear down the exit corridor, with several ‘black holes’ in their resume that they were not allowed to talk about, due to the nature of their Intelligence work. Fortunately for the institution itself, while the Personnel Division was ‘outside normal intelligence channels and trades’ the skill sets translated and helped broaden the experiences of those selected for the post. Generally, it was viewed as a ‘hardship tour’ by those selected, and people applied themselves as best they could. This meant that they were recognized for ‘trying to learn something new’.

The system combined the potentially large recognition and advancement opportunities with the disastrously steep cliff associated with complete failure and dismissal. The vast majority of those selected for the post worked as hard as they could on positive progression. It was one of the few postings where the Intelligence Community personnel wanted to stand out and be recognized for their work.

The way House Chroynos and specifically the empire’s VP Thomys Prometheon saw it was as if they were too stupid, stuck up, short-sighted, or incompetent to survive something as simple as securing and tracking: cooks, mechanics, tailors, weight trainers, health care professionals, butlers, maids and janitors, the House really did not want those same people in the larger intelligence services. If they were turned loose in the small, compartmentalized Intelligence services overseeing multi-billion credit projects or dozens of field agents who in turn could potentially coordinate hundreds more field assets, those flawed individuals could hide their incompetence for an entire career. VP Prometheon was particularly averse to allowing bad intelligence agents to advise Field Tactical Commanders on enemy movements. Thomys believed it was better to remove the incompetent fools early and often than find out later in their careers that they were fools when they screwed up colossally, costing unnumbered lives and millions of credits. He believed firmly that the sooner he found and disposed of those people the better. The tasks and oversights generally fell to the Empire’s VP.

When the chastened Heiress to the Empire with two angry Guardsmen entered in the latter half of the duty day, the only thing it could mean was trouble because the whole Empire knew she had disappeared the day before. It did not take a background in intelligence to see that type of trouble walk through the door. The agents kept their eyes on their work. The rumors that one of the employee ranks had ‘helped’ did not help the nervous situation either.

Her senior Guardsman pointed to a row of seats next to the door where two terrified mechanics were waiting for an annual evaluation interview, “Sit and do not move.” Persephone flopped into the chair with a bored sigh, while the older but powerfully built Guardsman worked his way past ever larger desks to the back office, in the corner. He kicked someone out who was meeting with the man who worked in the office and closed the door behind himself. The junior Guardsman stood, with his right shoulder to the door, in the middle of the waiting area impassively watching Persephone.

Persephone was finding it hard not to laugh about all of the confused looks and secretive glances. No one had any idea why she was really there. All they knew was what the rumors said. That and there was something ‘new’ in the Personnel Section and that was never a good sign.

Persephone decided to have a little fun. She figured she was there already so she might as well amuse herself. She turned to the closer mechanic and asked, “So what are you here for?” When he could only work his jaw and no sounds came out, she just smiled and said, “OK.”

Her Guardsman, who was still irritated by her disappearance, the lapse of security, and how it reflected so badly on himself, took it as a personal insult in the first place. He attempted his first correction, “My Lady, please sit still and do not bother anyone.”

Glancing at the now terrified mechanics, for an instant, she sat straight, smiled sweetly at the younger Guardsman, and replied, “Nope. My instructions were ‘sit and do not move’, so that is what I’ll do, neither one of you told me not to say anything, nor did you bar me from conversations or looking around, so there.” Then she added a truly juvenile touch; she stuck out her tongue and laughed with the mechanics; they were so aghast that they choked back their own humor. But they were not about to challenge a Guardsman. They were even more scary than Nobility. Their stories of bravery and savage combat prowess were legendary and finely polished as the Guardsmen’s most powerful recruiting tool.

The tech shared, “We are climate control mechanics, Miss, I mean, my Lady,” volunteered the mechanic two chairs away.

She asked, “Really? What do you do and why are you here?”

The air tech offered, “We maintain, balance, align, repair, and replace the ventilation systems and mechanicals for daily use in the Citadel and do special orders in preparation for events and gatherings. We are here for our mandatory annual evaluations.” Persephone cocked her head and smiled at the still silent one closer to her who nodded, and the second finished, “My Lady, I mean.”

Her standing Guardsman ground his teeth but remained silent, the conversation was innocuous and kept her occupied and out of his hair. He was not about to perturb the situation and add to his skyrocketing aggravation level.

She had to think about that and then offered, “Wow, when do you do that? I never see you working?”

The further of the two spoke first, “Miss, there are service tunnels for mechanical lines. We never have to enter the interior corridors, and everything we work on is adjusted and maintained on a schedule and out of sight. We do our repair and maintenance work regularly and phase through the system so no one area is ever without circulation. When we are working on a special event, we are generally in the room six to eight hours early to increase airflow, check and balance the system against the final guest list to make sure temperatures will remain perfect for the event.”

Persephone’s head flicked to the closer of the two mechanics as he began to speak quietly for the first time. “It’s not like we have ladders tall enough to reach the top of most of those rooms anyway. It’s easier to come at the problems from the ceiling.”

The mechanic who was farther away asked, “Why are you here if you do not mind, my Lady?”

Persephone’s conspiratorial smile irked her Guardsman who remained silent, “Because I got in trouble.”

He tried again to silence her, “That is enough Lady Persephone. Please stop tormenting these men.”

She teased, “Says you!” Persephone smiled back at her two new friends, “Besides, you two big angry Guardsmen have been following me around for almost seven months and you have not even told me your names! Why should I listen to you?”

He told her flatly, “Because I said so, that’s why.”

She sat for a second, deliberately looked like she was thinking, and quipped, “No, I do not feel like it.” Persephone looked back at the two climate control technicians with another smile. They were stuck between being mortified and laughing hysterically. She was having entirely too much fun for her Guardsmen’s comfort. “All you two do is buzz around me and take the fun out of life.”

The Guardsman responded coldly, “We perform our assigned duties Lady Persephone.”

Persephone snapped, “No, you do not. All you do is buzz around like annoying flies. Since I have no other names for you two, I’ll name you both myself. How about that? Your grumpy friend will be ‘Fly’ and you are now my ‘Mosquito’.”

The Guardsman droned, “My Lady, stop causing trouble for yourself.”

Persephone snapped, with faux enthusiasm, “Yes Sir! Mister Mosquito Sir! Any other orders Guardsman Mosquito, Sir?”

For the thousandth time in the last two days, the Guardsmen thought about how much he hated this assignment.

Persephone looked to the outer office door as it opened. A young woman entered, in the maid’s livery. She nearly jumped out of her skin when she ran into the tall and angry Black and Gold Imperial Guardsman. She almost fainted when she realized she almost landed on the Heiress to the Empire. She jumped again when the Guardsman spoke directly to her, “They are waiting for you in the corner office Miss,” he said pointing where she needed to go.

She hurried to comply, happy to escape but completely unaware of her fate.

After the young maid left, her Guardsman locked Persephone’s eyes and wagged his finger at her, indicating she stood and should follow, “Yes Sir, Guardsman Mosquito, Sir!” Her giggling salute set his jaw muscles to stand out as he ground his teeth. His left arm pointed like an arrow to the office indicating she should follow the maid whose uniform was stolen in preparation for Persephone’s flight.

Thank You!

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Your next chapter is HERE.

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