Ascent. Part Five
We took the sins of our society into space. Colonel Adrian Huxton just wants to climb to the top.
-
To Colonel Adrian Huxton (to My Lady Colonel Tarly Artreyas.)
The Armada is not a fair organization. It is a pyramid, with officers constantly competing to climb the levels. This competition breeds the best officers because they must prove they are the best in order to advance. It also does so in the comparative safety of a controlled environment, without the random chance of warfare.
That said, while I sympathize with your unfortunate position I find myself unable to intervene. The politics of this duel (your contest for the fate of your family) have spun a large web beyond just this issue. I must do my honorable duty and look at the greater good of Tollyon and the Armada. So, I will not intervene. (Regretfully My Lady, I cannot choose a side.)
Therefore, I bid you both good fortune, and hope your duel ends with minimal damage to either of you, and therefore the Armada.
-
Adrian lowered his comp. “Well…” he shook his head so hard he trembled head to toe.
Tarly released him and stepped sideways out of his grasp. He pivoted to keep facing her. The utter pain on her face mirrored his own. Looking into her own pain, it was enough to make him tear up.
“Can we,” they began at the same time.
“Talk one more time?” Adrian said.
“Discuss how I’ll win this fight?” Tarly said.
Adrian looked down at the ground. “I…”
“I’ll compensate you. You’re still a colonel, and you are still my friend.” She took his shoulder and looked in his eyes with a gentle smile. Adrian had seen her only use that smile to charm others. Bouncers, security guards, other officers.
“Tarly, you’re my friend,” he objected.
“And I’ll always have your back, but this is my life on the line.”
“Stop staring at me like that,” Adrian said.
“Adrian, I’m feeling pity for you. You shouldn’t have been caught up in this,” she said.
That was supposed to comfort him, Adrian realized as he felt smaller. The smaller he got, the more his connection detached. He backed out of her grasp. “I…I don’t need pity, I just need someone to talk to me,” he said.
Tarly withdrew and held her hands up open-palmed. Adrian had learned that gesture during his online university courses. It was basic child de-escalation strategy. ‘See, look my hands are open? That means I have nothing to hide’ “Okay. I’m just…I’m sorry Adrian. I wish you hadn’t been pulled into this.”
He nodded, “I’m here though. And we have a fight coming up.”
“You’re going to fight me to win?” she said.
“Yeah,” he said.
She bit her lip and nodded. “Adrian. This isn’t your fault. This is my aunt’s fault, and Mathias’ fault.”
“No, it’s my fault in part. Whether I like it or not.”
“You’re my friend.”
“I am,” he said. “However, I am choosing to survive.”
“You’ll make it. I’ll take care of you. You are my friend after all, and I do have friends with connections,” Tarly said.
“That’s not survival. That’s just existing. I am nothing without this uniform,” Adrian said. He squeezed his eyes shut against the tears welling up. “I’m not losing it.”
“Then I’ll fight you,” she said as a glare came on her face. It was beautiful that she took him seriously as a threat.
“Good, fight to win because I am,” he said.
“Yeah and I hate doing this. So please just back down, this is the only way to beat my aunt.”
“Let’s kill your aunt!” Adrian burst out. Tarly’s eyes went wide. “We’re soldiers with swords. Let’s go hunt her down now,” he continued as fire burned through him. His heart pounded as he fantasized about that hired fixer’s face peeling apart in his fingertips, his skull crunching with repeated slams into a titanium wall. He didn’t want Tarly’s aunt. Tarly could have her. He wanted the lowborn that enabled her.
His vision cleared and Tarly had backed two steps away. “You’re insane,” she said.
He sucked in a deep breath. This was too far, he thought. He breathed in over and over, anything to lower his blood pressure and get a grip. “She’d lose though.”
“That doesn’t mean we win. We will lose too. So, I’ll see you at the duel,” Tarly said.
Adrian didn’t apologize. Sorry meant he wished he hadn’t done something. He was not sorry for picking this.
“I’ll see you at the fight then,” Tarly said. She hit the elevator open door and hurried out. They were in a public terminal. The front lines of people looked in to see if there was an elevator available. Adrian slammed the close button with his ID. When the door shut, he leaned his head against their cold titanium.
“This is your level,” Molitor said. His massive hand gently took his shoulder. “Take a minute.”
“You don’t need to stay,” Adrian said.
“I’m walking you home,” Molitor said.
“You’re on my side?”
“If I’m forced to choose. I grew up in an asteroid mine, remember? One mistake, you die amongst the rocks. I know what it’s like to face losing everything. I sympathize with you,” Molitor said. He hit the ‘shut door’ again.
Monday morning, the doctor on duty at Academy Medical gave him a handful of pain pills and told him his hand was clear for limited use. Adrian asked about the dangers of a second break. The doctor offered to give him a kiss if it made him feel better, and rolled his eyes.
So that afternoon Adrian grabbed a private workout cell in the academy gym. He took a sparring drone and armed it with a training longsword. It would give his chest and arms a hard bruise at worst.
He placed the drone at one end of the sparring mat and walked to the other. He spun around on the heel of his left foot and planted his right foot with a solid thump.
Fighting with a gladius was like boxing. He raised his arms in a boxer’s stance with the gladius held straight up. His left hand was the sword hand. His right was for grappling and punching. He wouldn’t be doing much punching, so he was already fighting down a third of his armament.
Adrian twisted his left wrist and bent his arm, so the gladius was pointed straight ahead. Now he was at combat ready.
“Combat drone. Activate now,” he said.
The drone made its own fighting stance. It took a high guard with the sword tip aimed at the ceiling. Both its hands were on the longsword’s hilt, one atop the other. The sparring programs were coded to be as organic as possible and took inspiration from motion captures of actual academy instructors. The drone took a few practice swings, then heft the blade up and held it out on the diagonal. It strode towards Adrian and stopped three paces away.
Adrian waited. The drone waited.
Then he rolled his eyes. “Combat drone. Set protocol to aggressive.”
The drone swung at him so fast he had to launch himself back to save his shoulder. Then he kept backpedaling as the drone recovered and swung again. Then again. Adrian felt his right heel hit the little raised barrier of the sparring mat.
He deflected the next swing aside and swung an elbow at the drone’s shoulder. The drone retreated and reversed blade course. Adrian deflected that on his first step, then countered at its belly, forcing it to swing down and deflect his own sword. He poked the drone’s chin with his right thumb. Not a full punch but as per programming the drone recoiled like it had taken a punch to the jaw
Adrian pressed on, batting its sword arm aside as it reeled. The drone’ shoulders swung and made a quick riposte at his chest but Adrian had seen the shoulders, and was already stepping aside. He snatched its hands and pinned the hilt against his body, then stabbed down into its knees. The drone shuddered and dropped to one knee. Adrian stopped short, because this was a duel to the last standing. Not to kill.
The drone rolled onto his back and swung upwards. Adrian stumbled back, grinning at the ingenuity of such a move. He stopped short and came back hard. He drove the now one-legged drone into the ground and stabbed through its skull.
“Congratulations,” a speaker announced from deep in the drone’s armored chest. “Resetting programming.”
The drone stood up at attention. The nano-paste in its body filled in the wounds. Adrian paused to think it over.
The fight had been too standard. Textbook learning led to many decent swords who used similar moves attacking from similar angles, and thought of similar tactics. Tarly was not textbook. Her strikes came from all sorts of off-angles that carved through standard angled guards. Adrian couldn’t make the drone do that with its existing program and he didn’t know enough about simulations and programming to come up with a new program.
“Drone. Engage,” he said.
The drone dropped back into a fighting stance. It circled around him a bit, and he pivoted on his right foot to keep facing it. Until it changed directions. Adrian kept going the first way, while watching it from the corner of his eye.
The drone immediately strafed further and swung at his back. Adrian sidestepped it and slammed a swift kick home into the drone’s knees. It stumbled and he cut both its wrists.
“Congratulations,” it said, and stood back at attention.
Adrian kept it up a few more hours. He tried different presets, and even booted up simulations of a few past Academy instructors.
By two hours sweat was dripping off his brow, and he’d thoroughly warmed up. “Deactivate drone,” he said, and sat down on the bench to catch his breath.
Only now he’d stopped concentrating on the fight did he feel his chest heaving, lungs pushing against aching ribs. He put his head in his hands and took deep breaths to make it settle down.
Except his breathing kept hammering. His chest burned and didn’t stop. Adrian looked to the life support monitor on the wall and saw the air was at its normal CO2-O2 mixture. As he read it, his sweat went cold.
He opened his comp and did a medical scan of himself with shaking hands. He had to jam his wrist into his chest to hold it steady.
It chirped happily that all vitals were normal. Adrian put his head in his hands and closed his eyes beneath his palms. They shook against him. His clothes hugged him cold and tight like ice.
“You’re fine,” he muttered. “You are just fighting another duel and you are completely fine. Stop panic-“ he burst into coughing and lost control of everything. Saliva spat up on the floor and he doubled over so far, he ducked between his knees and shivered.
Only then it finally stopped, as slowly as it began. Adrian suddenly realized he was no longer shaking, and his body was warm. He looked up, then straightened. The room hadn’t changed and somehow the fact that everything remained the same around him surprised him. He blinked and looked around himself just to make sure. The world had remained static while he died inside.
Adrian unfolded and stood. His gladius thumped to the mat, and he snatched it back up in a hurry. Long ago in officer college, letting his sword touch the ground during parades meant a ten-minute sweat session afterwards. He’d already been trained by ten years of enlisted soldiering to never to release his weapon, so he’d never dropped his. Molitor had had plenty of accidental ground interactions thanks to his sheer size. Tarly had been careless. She’d once left her sword in a classroom. Just got up and went to lunch with the sword leaning on her desk.
For that the drill instructors had treated Adrian, Molitor, and her to a two-hour cardio session. In full battle armor.
I sweat more doing that, but it had been hot sweat, Adrian thought. He sheathed his gladius. “Drone, return to storage,” he said.
“Good fighting,” the drone said and marched back to its rack.
Someone knocked at the door. Adrian drew his gladius again, then stopped himself at how silly it was to expect a murder attempt down here. He sheathed it again and answered.
Mcarron’s aide stood there in full dress uniform. Her skirt was smudged with a bit of dirt, which surprised Adrian.
“Hello, Lady Major,” he said.
“Sir,” she said and turned her nose up at him. “I’ve come here with a gift.”
“I really don’t care,” Adrian said. “If you’re going to set another horde of junior officers on me, I’d reconsider. Poison would work better,” he said. It would give him a good excuse to lose. Something he could reassure himself with while growing old somewhere lonely and irrelevant.
She sniffed at him. “The purpose of indoctrination is to break an officer down so he can be molded back up to fit the template the Armada needs. In this case, as a reliable academy professor. You acted out.”
“Indoctrination is to be done in a safe, controlled environment so no real danger comes to the officer. A brawl in an elevator full of jutting metal edges is not a controlled environment,” Adrian said.
Her head lowered so she was staring at eye level. Her brow was smooth, yet he caught all the hostility in her green eyes. “It wasn’t a brawl. It was an initiation every lowborn staff goes through. You didn’t accept it.”
“Well, there’s twelve new teachers this school year. Each of them is a chance for something to go wrong in your little beat down,” Adrian said. “One of those guys could have been killed if they hit their head when they fell. Or me if I fell. Okay? I don’t care about getting punched in the face I’m used to that. You did it unsafely and five people were rendered unfit for duty for days as a result.”
She nodded softly, honestly. The anger in her eyes faded and she studied him. Adrian fumbled his reply and remained silent, as he tried to categorize that sudden change.
“Well. I’m not here to continue indoctrination. Mccarron has noted that you losing your duel will reflect badly on the academy, and give a civilian a bit of soft leverage over our institution. He considers you winning to be an important undertaking.” She opened her comp and threw a data file across. It cleared Adrian’s firewalls in five seconds.
“So what’s this?” he said.
“A recording of Tarly’s first duel against her eldest brother Invorran, fought an hour ago” the aide said. “Consider yourself valuable.”
Adrian accepted. “Thanks…” he read the nametag off her uniform. “Lady Major Nessella.”
She nodded and hurried off without a word. He noticed she wasn’t strutting like nobility did. She walked with shoulders hunched a bit and heels hammering on the deck in her hurry to leave. It was like an office worker going home from work. Very un-refined.
Adrian shrugged and headed back. He grabbed his stuff and showered at the Academy, then changed into sweats.
Once he was back in his apartment, he sat cross-legged in his bed with a beer tucked in the crook in either knee, and projected the video on the far wall.
Tarly strode into the little ring, clad in all black. No Armada uniform. Invorran, a decade older, took position three steps away in his Armada service uniform. His hair was black as hers except for a few stylish flecks of grey in his beard.
The judge stepped forth and placed his staff between them. “You are here to settle a manner of honor, and you will settle it honorably. You will use only the weapons you registered beforehand. There will be no hidden biological agents and no undeclared augments. You will not stab your opponent in the back, or throw your blades. The winner will be the last combatant capable of standing. Do you understand?”
Tarly and her brother nodded together. “Brother. Does our dad haunt your dreams from the next world? Asking you why you insulted him so?” she said.
“Please, little sister. Father was old and enfeebled when he made his will. He’d be comforted that I’m upholding his desires in his prime.”
“I only earned his respect in the last few years of his life. You never earned it. You just honored him and he saw through your attitude. I tried to equal him, and he loved me for it. He’d hate you for proving all his beliefs correct,” Tarly said.
Adrian snickered despite his pounding heart. True words. Tarly had earned her inheritance. She’d burst into screams of delight after her father had told her she was the best of her. He paused and opened the picture of his daughter again.
Then he restarted the recording. “Impudence!” Invorran said and drew his saber at the same time. Tarly didn’t draw. She circled around him, skirting the edges of the arena while he swiveled to keep pace. She was daring him to strike.
He didn’t. His arm began to shake from holding the blade aloft. His angry look loosened into frustration. His blade dropped.
Tarly struck in a blur, sword swinging off her back as her wrap-scabbard split. Adrian caught a glimpse of an overhand strike coming at a slight angle. Her brother ruined his guard to block it and staggered back. Tarly followed up with sweeping strikes that drove him back fast. His footing slipped. Then he dug his heel in and swiped her sword aside before swinging at her wrists in a textbook saber cut.
Tarly dodged the cut so close her left cuff split. She cornered off the wall and swung low at his trailing left leg.
Inovrran howled and collapsed mid stride. Blood flowed out the stump above his ankle. It drenched his other leg as he stared at it.
“Finished!” the judge said and put his staff between the two. Tarly shook her head and stormed off without a word.
What Adrian had learned was Tarly had grown since they’d last sparred. The wall push off to dodge into the killing blow was something he’d never seen. She was more mobile than he remembered and had flowed like water. It did confirm that her basic style hadn’t changed. He recognized all the angles she’d attacked from, and the sweeping slashes to keep the shorter saber out of reach.
Adrian finished his first beer, and flung it at the recycler beside his desk. It bounced off the wall and clattered inside. The recycler hummed as it broke the can down into pellets of its component elements. Adrian popped the tab on the second and sipped it to fuel his theorycrafting.
Tarly was just as patient as he remembered. Which meant he could either wait her out or go on the offensive.
He discarded waiting her out. If he did, he ceded the initiative to Tarly to circle him and attack at will. So he’d have to initiate. Strike fast and get into grappling range where her long sword would become clumsy. And he couldn’t slow down lest she pull back and find room to maneuver. Which was an advantage of his, he thought with excitement. He’d known /’seventeen. He’d always trained for conditioning over strength to compensate.
This fight would be a long-distance race, but sprinted at maximum speed. He’d have to keep the pressure up the entire time and if he couldn’t cut her down fast, rely on his superior conditioning to wear her down.
His hands shook, again. All his memories of fighting Tarly and being pushed to the limit came back. Except now he’d lose limbs.
“It’s okay to be afraid,” he whispered to himself. The first person to ever tell him that had been a Drill Instructor at boot camp, when he was seventeen.
After his second day of sparring, he was feeling back in shape. The drone couldn’t imitate her moves, but it was sharpening his skills.
Mid-fight, someone knocked on the door. He paused the drone, then answered to find Lady Major Nessella waiting with her arms crossed.
“I’ve got her second duel, sir,” she said and looked at him at eye level, on equal ground. “Not sure how much you’ll learn from it though.”
Adrian considered the first use of his proper title.
Then the duel. Tarly’s middle brother Narvo had only learned basic sword fighting. He was a banker by trade. Their father had come to respect him for taking a completely different path with his career, but ultimately declared Tarly was worthy.
“No there’s definitely something in there. I need to see how she moves.”
“Well, from what I’ve heard it went quick, and her brother died.”
“Oh really?” he said, his mood brightening.
“Yes sir. She murdered him in cold blood, why are you so excited about that, sir?”
“He deserved it. Her three brothers and aunt all got shares of the inheritance. They took it all out of jealousy. Tarly is the rightful heir,” he said. He glared back at her and let all his anger flow up into it.
Nessella turned halfway to leave, then spun back, her sash flicking around her. “Mcarron wants to know you have it in you to win.”
“Is he going to vouch for replacing me if I say no?” Adrian said.
“He will not.”
“Then, I do have it in me,” he said.
“He’s not certain.”
“Well, I do.”
“Do you have a better justification than that?”
Like he’d share that with anyone. “No,” Adrian said. “By your leave.”
“She’s going to kill you,” Nessella said suddenly.
Adrian sucked in a deep breath. He was angry with Mcarron, Venko, and everyone else on top. Not this mid-level messenger officer. “Our leadership has taken my best friend from me and forced me to fight her in a duel because of honor, the hollowest concept of them all. Now you are worried I don’t have it in me to win. You will sweat it out until the appointed time of the fight, and then you’ll find out,” he said.
A pause. He waited for the noblewoman’s justification. This would be good. Nothing like an out of touch highborn trying to explain loss to him.
She looked over her shoulder. The new cadets were taking boxing lessons across the vast room. The distant roar of their cheers echoed back.
“It’s okay to be angry…at Lords Mcarron and Venko,” she said.
Adrian raised an eyebrow at her. “Really?”
“Yes, sir,” she said and walked away without further words.
Narvo was not a sword. He came in designer fitness clothes, with scale armor strapped to his chest. The judge went through his spiel and backed away.
Tarly drew soon as her brother did. She lunged at him in an instant. He yelped and backed away, swinging wildly at her. Tarly could have just knocked the sword from his fingers, but that wasn’t how to end a feud like this. She strafed around him, then when he swung she caught his wrist by the flat end. Adrian heard the dry snap, like a thick branch breaking. Her brother howled.
Tarly slashed his left leg high enough to split his femoral. Then as he fell, sliced along his left arm, opening the arteries cleanly.
Adrian finished the video and went right back to sparring. The brutality to that little shit had gotten his blood howling. He tore through the drone. Then activated a second drone and sent it at him.
This was just getting himself to life and death, Adrian thought as two drones drove him back. They came at right angles of him and attacked on the flanks, longswords slicing air as they came for him.
Adrian darted left and under a swinging longsword. He cut a leg out from under one and shoved it into the other. Then he was on the offensive and in twenty seconds, he was panting and both drones were on the ground.
“Congratulations.”
“Congratulations.” They both stood at attention.
Adrian ran it again until they kicked his ass. It took four fights until a boot caught him in the ribs and he fell to the ground. He threw out his right hand to catch them, and pain shot through his knuckles. Something popped in there.
“Fuck!”
He stabbed a leg with his sword. The drone fell atop him and he gasped as the air was driven from his lungs. The drone simply rolled a bit to jam its shoulder into his jaw. Adrian twisted his gladius and buried it deep somewhere in the fake ribs.
The other drone rapped his knuckles hard enough to loosen his grip, then pinned him under its boot. He looked up as its blade pointed straight over his mouth.
“Defeated,” it said. “Your record is twenty-nine kills to one. Do you wish to continue?” Both drones stood at attention.
“No,” he said and slumped back. “Conclude training. Return to storage.”
He yanked off the brace and checked it out. They were all reddish and slightly swollen. Except the middle finger was purple and freshly swelling.
“Fuck!”
He stowed his sword and uniform. He was too frustrated to go through the dance of showering in a locker room. He’d just go straight home and do it there.
The next day, he stayed in his classroom long after dinner and watched the first two duels on repeat on the floor to ceiling computer. He took notes.
There was a knock at the door.
Adrian felt lonely. Lady Nessella was not the person he’d ever want to talk to, but her behavior the last two days had intrigued him. And he was too tired to get angry right now. “Enter!” he said.
Her heels clicked down the stairs. “I’ve got the third duel,” she said. She stood beside him and watched Tarly cut her oldest brother to pieces.
“Ever fought a duel?” Adrian probed her.
“Yes,” she said.
“You win?”
“I did.”
“Who was it?” he said. She remained silent for a long while. “You don’t need to say it. Thank you for the file,” he cut it off quickly.
“My husband,” she said.
Adrian paused the feed and rotated himself around the desk to face her. He saw no wedding ring on her fingers. “Why?”
“Political marriage gone wrong,” she said. “I process the paperwork on about twelve new professors and aides a semester. They’re all out for the same things here. They stop being people to me.”
“So am I,” he said.
“Yeah, but no one else has complained about being attacked in an uncontrolled environment,” she said.
“It’s being responsible,” he said.
“I’m surprised you weren’t angry at me for sending them at you,” she said.
“You get used to it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Please survive this duel.”
Can you stop? Adrian thought. This breaching of protocol was completely unexpected. Instead, he scooted over to give her room. “I’m going to watch this now.”
She turned and hauled herself up on his desk and tucked her arms and legs in beside him.
Adrian watched the third duel. Tarly’s youngest brother was a year older than her. He was the only one she’d exchanged vid messages with, far back as Adrian could remember. He came out with a longsword a bit longer than hers, to account for his greater height.
“You of all people,” Tarly said.
“It was all of us or nothing. I had to go with the majority,” Terrvan said.
“We could have sided together,” she said.
“Then I wouldn’t have gotten anything out of it,” Terrvan said with a sigh. “I had to think about my own family here.”
“Sure,” Tarly said and drew. He drew with her. They slammed into each other with a double thud and crashing blades. They were a mirror image of swinging blades and blocking over and over. Terrvan took a step forwards, and Tarly retreated. Then another step. He lunged forwards, grinning pure confidence.
Tarly parried his sword down and to the right. Then countered straight at his heart. He yelled and twisted to evade. His sword scraped along the ground as he swung it back at her legs.
Tarly leapt over it, then swung straight down and through his right shoulder. Terrvan fell to the ground. “Stop, please. I yield!”
Tarly yanked the blade back. His arm was still attached, but his entire right side hung at an angle, blood pouring out from ruptured blood vessels. The judge proclaimed her victor. Immediately a stretcher was on the arena with two medics. They sprayed his wound full of white gel and injected zynoblood straight into his jugular so it would be pumped right back into the heart, oxygenated up with five times the oxygen normal red blood cells could hold, and be pumped out. They’d learned from her middle brother’s death and had him stabilized and off the arena floor in thirty seconds.
“I’d have lost just as fast,” Lady Nessella said.
“I might,” he said. “What happened to your husband?”
“He locked me out of the apartment and went off to a ball. I broke through the window, grabbed my sword, and went after him.” She pulled up her left sleeve to reveal a long scar. “Broken glass. I challenged him in front of about two hundred people. Then I put my rapier through his eye socket.
“Nice move,” Adrian said. “What’d the Admiralty think.”
“I joined the Armada to escape the consequences,” she said.
“Nothing without the uniform?” Adrian said.
“Yes sir,” she said. He nodded.
He let her sit there and watch while he reviewed the fight a few more times and made notes. If, somehow, she was spying for Tarly, that was alright. If she were spying for Mcarron, he didn’t care. Having someone sitting next to him, sharing the experience was too good a feeling to let go of.
He ended just before lights out. Tomorrow was the duel.
“I’ll see you on Monday, Milady,” he said.
She hopped down. “Please be there.”
Note from the Author: Paid Options
Hello friends. I’ve been thinking about adding a paid option to Vindicators for a while, but I’ve always stopped short. I wasn’t sure how to reward subscribers since I didn’t want to paywall any content, and I was nervous about asking for money. Four months ago, I moved across the USA fora new job. I was just abruptly laid off.
This experience has absolutely sucked. It’s also made me realize that, even as I look for new employment, I put enough time into my writing that I should be trying to make money from it.
So, I’m announcing that I will have a paypal button under all stories. If you liked this story and appreciate my work, feel free to show your support by tipping me. The finale of Ascent. is coming up next week. In the meantime, I’ll work on what to add for a paid subscription option since I refuse to take anything away.
Danged man, Tarly is a beast of a duelist. I wonder if Adrian even stands a chance of beating her.
Greed has been the death of more people than it should ever be.
With layoffs starting hard all over the U.S. I bought you a coffee and donut to help out a little. Good story