Storm Force: Book Three of the Last Legion Series by Chris Bunch Page B

mind.
    “I know what you are,” she said slowly. “Probably, I guess, what you always will be. So there’s no good in my saying anything.
    “Except this, you bastard. You are going to take one day, and one night, off before you go. I’ll make sure you eat nothing but your favorite foods, so you have something to remember, out there on whatever horrible world you’re going to, eating dried bat shit.
    “And I want to make sure I walk bowlegged when you leave, so
I
have something to remember, ‘til you get back.”
    • • •
    The first ship to lift clear of Camp Mahan was a newly commissioned light destroyer, Garvin’s team aboard. Two
velvs
followed,
aksai
hanging from them like remoras.
    Off D-Cumbre, they flickered into hyperspace, six jumps from the nearly unknown system of Kura.

CHAPTER
8

Larix/Larix Prime
    Njangu Yoshitaro beavered on, scudding back and forth across Larix. He found problems, areas where the system was vulnerable. Small ones were reported to Redruth as he’d been ordered, potential big ones were noted for when — when, not if, Yoshitaro insisted to himself — he was able to find reliable offplanet communications.
    He fell into the habit of working out in the same government gym Celidon used. When they sparred, as they did occasionally, Njangu was carefully less quick, less skilled than the other man.
    Sometimes they met for dinner at one or another of the restaurants the government’s elite favored. Celidon was hardly a gourmet, his standard order underdone beef and raw vegetables. This, Njangu discovered the hard way, wasn’t spartanism — Larissan cooking preferred everything either cooked gray, or buried under a highly spiced sauce.
    Their conversations were mostly fencing matches, which Njangu quite enjoyed, neither man willing to talk in specifics about his ideas or past or ambitions.
    Yoshitaro did learn, however, at least one interesting series of facts:
    Redruth had done exactly as Danfin Froude theorized: When the “troubles” started in the Confederation, Redruth had responded instantly, not wanting a “plague of anarchy” to intrude on his domain. As the situation worsened within the Empire, Redruth had banned most shipping into the Confederation. The few ships permitted out-system returned reporting planetary systems pulling out of the Confederation, and using the chaos to seize neighboring worlds, systems.
    “It looked to the Protector,” Celidon went on, “as if civil war, if civil war can have a dozen different sides, was spreading. When Centrum itself screamed for support, Redruth refused, saying that war was raging through his own worlds, and he had no soldiers to spare. Cleverly, he saw nothing to be gained by losing his best troops in a distant galaxy, or, worse, having them come home infected with whatever ideas were destroying the stability of the Confederation.
    “Redruth followed that up with garbled messages that suggested the situation was worsening.”
    “Would one of them maybe have been that Cumbre had fallen out of contact?”
    “Something like that,” Celidon said, washing down the last of his meat with ice water. “Ships coming from your … sorry, the worlds you were reporting from or the Confederation were taken.”
    Njangu remembered that a ship called the
Malvern
, which he and Garvin had been aboard as raw recruits, had been seized by Celidon’s men.
    “But you knew that,” Celidon said. “Weren’t you the bright lad who suborned that official on Centrum to let us know anytime something interesting in the way of materials would be passing our way?”
    Njangu hid his surprise and smiled blandly.
    “Eventually, I suppose, the Confederation assumed Larix/Kura/Cumbre had fallen into the same shitter as everyone else,” Celidon continued, “and so they stopped signaling and sending ships.
    “Of course,” Celidon went on, “this isn’t just game-playing on the part of the Protector. In five or six years, maybe more, maybe less, when