had held a series of slightly above average posts, who had won a little more than his share of military awards and honors, and who had been promoted regularly. Then, suddenly, for no apparent reason, his career had taken a sharp upturn. For no readily apparent reason, he had been appointed head of the Emperor’s bodyguards. That had been followed by another sudden shift from the army to the navy and a promotion to commander.
Prek believed the promotion was because of special service to the Emperor. Sten’s record was a fake. Actually, Prek thought, Sten had been a valued intelligence agent. The shift to the navy and, ultimately, to his command of four tacships had been a reward for services rendered. Those services, Prek was sure, included the murder of his brother.
Prek had tracked Sten forward to the final battle for Cavite City, where enormous casualties had been suffered on both sides. Tahn records indicated that Sten had probably died in that battle, although his remains had never been found. There had been some out-of-the-ordinary official effort to determine Sten’s fate because of “criminal actions instigated by said Imperial officer” prior to the battle for Cavite.
Prek did not believe Sten was dead. His profile showed him to be a man who would do anything to survive. Prek also did not believe that Sten was serving elsewhere. He was an officer who would always be in the forefront of battle, and he was also the kind of hero the Eternal Emperor liked to feed into his propaganda machine.
No. Sten was alive. And Prek was determined to run him to the ground. He would find the man and then… The Tahn brushed that thought from his mind. He could not allow emotion to interfere with the hunt.
Senior Captain (Intelligence) Lo Prek was right.
Sten was alive.
CHAPTER TWO
TWO EMACIATED, SHAVEN-headed men crouched, motionless, in the thigh-deep muck.
One of them had been Commander Sten, formerly commanding officer of the now-destroyed Imperial Cruiser Swampscott. Sten had assumed command of the obsolete rust-bucket in the final retreat from Cavite and had fought a desperate rearguard action against an entire Tahn fleet. One ultramodern Tahn battleship had been destroyed by the Swampscott’s missiles and a second had been crippled beyond repair, even as the Tahn blasts shattered the cruiser. In the final moments, Sten had opened his com and sent a surrender signal. He had collapsed long before the Tahn boarded the hulk that had been a fighting ship. That almost certainly had saved his life.
Seconds after Sten went out, Warrant Officer Alex Kilgour, a heavy-world thug, ex-Mantis Section assassin, and Sten’s best friend struggled back to consciousness. He bloodily registered, on the Swampscott’s single functioning screen, Tahn tacships closing in. He foggily thought that the Tahn, barbarians, “ae th’ Campbell class,” would not properly honor the man who had destroyed the nucleus of a Tahn fleet. More likely, Sten would be pitched out the nearest lock into space.
“Tha’ dinnae be braw nor kosher,” he muttered. Kilgour wove his way to a sprawled body, unsealed the suit, and tore away the corpse’s ID tags. He checked a wall-mounted pressure readout. There were still a few pounds of atmosphere remaining in the CIC. Sten’s suit came open, air hissing out, and his ID tags were replaced. Kilgour heard/felt the crashing as the Tahn blew a lock open and decided that it might be expedient for him to be unconscious as well.
Fewer than thirty gore-spattered, shocked Imperial sailors were transferred from the wreck of the Swampscott to the hold of a Tahn assault transport. Among them was one Firecontrol-man 1st Class Samuel Horatio.
Sten.
Fed and watered only as an afterthought, their wounds left untreated, twenty-seven survived to be unloaded on a swamp-world that the Tahn had grudgingly decided would be a war prisoner planet.
The Tahn believed that the highest death a being could find was in a battle. Cowardice or surrender were unthinkable. According to their belief, any Imperial soldier or sailor unlucky enough to be captured should have begged for instant death. But they were also sophisticated enough to realize grudgingly that other cultures felt differently and that such assistance to the dishonored might be misinterpreted. And so they let their captives live. For a while.
The Tahn saw no reason why, if prisoners were a burden to the Tahn, that burden should not be repaid. Repaid in sweat: slave labor.
Medical care: If the prisoners included med personnel, they had a medic. No supplies were provided. Any Imperial medical supplies captured were confiscated.
Shelter: Prisoners were permitted, on their own time, using any nonessential items permitted by the camp officers, to build shelter.
Working hours: At any task assigned, no limitations on hours or numbers of shifts.
Food: For humans, a tasteless slab that purported to provide the necessary nutrients. Except that a hardworking human needed about 3,600 calories per day. Prisoners were provided less than 1,000. Similar ratios and lack of taste were followed for the ET prisoners.
Since the prisoners were shamed beings, of course their guards were also soldiers in disgrace. Some of them were the crafty, who reasoned that shame in a guard unit was better than death in an assault regiment. There were a few—a very few—guards who had previously been trusties on one of the Tahn’s own prison worlds.
The rules for prisoners were simple: Stand at attention when any guard talks to you, even if you were a general and he or she was a private. Run to obey any order. Failure to obey: death. Failure to complete a task in the time and manner assigned: death. Minor infractions: beatings, solitary confinement, starvation.
In the Tahn POW camps, only the hard survived.
Sten and Alex had been prisoners for over three years.
Their rules were simple:
Never forget that the war cannot last forever.
Never forget you are a soldier.
Always help your fellow prisoner.
Always eat anything offered.
Both of them wished they had been brought up religious—faith in any or all gods kept prisoners alive. They had seen what happened to other prisoners, those who had given up hope, those who thought they could not filter through animal excrement for bits of grain, those who rebelled, and those who thought they could lone-wolf it.
After three years, all of them were long dead.
Sten and Alex had survived.
Their previous training in the supersecret, survive-anything Mantis Section of the Empire’s Mercury Corps might have helped. Sten also knew clotting well that having Alex to back his act had saved him. Kilgour privately felt the same. And there was a third item: Sten was armed.
Years earlier, before he had entered Imperial service, Sten had constructed a weapon—a tiny knife. Double-edged and needle-sharp, hand-formed from an exotic crystal, its edge would cut through any known metal or mineral. The knife was sheathed in Sten’s arm, its release muscle-controlled. It was a very deadly weapon—although, in their captivity, it had been used mostly as a tool.
That night it would assist in their escape.
There had been very few escapes from the Tahn POW camps. At first those who had tried had been executed after recapture, and recaptured they almost always were. The first problem—getting out of a camp or fleeing from a work gang—was not that hard. Getting off the world itself was almost insurmountable. Some had made it as stowaways—or at least the prisoners hoped the escapees had succeeded. Others escaped and went to ground, living an outlaw existence only marginally better than life in the camps, hoping that the war would eventually end and they would be rescued.
Within the last year there had been a policy change—prisoners attempting an escape were not immediately murdered. Instead they were purged to a mining world, a world where, the guards gleefully told them, a prisoner’s life span was measured in hours.
Sten and Alex had made four escape attempts in the three years they had been prisoners. Two tunnels had been discovered in the digging, a third attempt