Eye of the Storm - Part One
"Sandstorm"
Facilis descensus Averno; Noctes atque dies patet atri janua Ditis; Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras, Hoc opus, hic labor est
Publius Vergilius Maro: Aeneid
Prologue - Part One
Planet DS-555 "Dis". Earth-standard time: January 2874
The winds never stopped. That was the worst thing about the planet. Long ago most of its mountains had been ground into dust - as one wag put it, the irony was that the dust that now swept the planet on a regular basis, whipped up by winds created high in the atmosphere by the constant bombardment of solar rays from two uncaring yellow suns, was responsible for the wear and tear in the first place. Tectonically almost inert, the thin crustal plates moved so slowly that their infrequent rubbing together hadn't got a prayer of raising up new mountains. Water was locked underground in ancient aquifers so deep you needed specialist equipment to drill for it, and in the constant heat of a binary system it didn't stand a chance once exposed on the surface. True, there were a couple of very large, deep magma chambers, but those hadn't caused any significant activity in several hundred thousand years.
Not even the most desperate settlers had been persuaded to homestead on Dis. A barren world where any topsoil had long since been scattered across its Earth-sized surface, the only settlements were those set up by the mining consortium which had surveyed the system in the early years of the diaspora, and logged the presence of a small - but very lucrative - vein of yttrium bearing ore with a higher than usual yield of dysprosium. Subsequent surveys had uncovered a wealth of rare earth minerals and unusual lanthanide isotopes.
As a result, Doppler Corp was one of - if not the richest - consortiums operating in the further reaches of colonial space. A "family run" business for over eight hundred years, they had expanded and colonised an entire sector. But one reason they stayed so powerful - and on the board - was their refusal to let any opportunity for profit pass by. So a marginal world where machinery would be stripped to its inner workings in a matter of weeks by an atmosphere intent on sandblasting anything out in the open was a niggling problem, since machinery capable of operating in those conditions would reduce any profit by a considerable margin. But a problem solved by an ancient solution.
Machines were expensive. People were not. And they have the benefit of being both self-repairing, and self-reproducing.
Victor Harken stood on the gantry overlooking the cargo hangar, his hands clasped behind his back, shoulders straight, standing to attention as though on a parade ground. He could still feel the annoying tickle of his recently cut blond hair on his neck and on the tips of his delicately pointed ears, and forced himself not to give in to the urge to reach a hand up to brush it off. It was probably just his imagination anyway - any barber who'd left a mess would shortly be joining the milling mass of prisoners currently being chivvied off the ramp of the most recently arrived transport.
Most of these, he noticed with a curl of his top lip, were wearing the remnants of fleet uniforms - mostly the dark brown of enlisted ranks, but here and there he spotted the dark green of command, and the blue of engineering. And if a few of the men and women below were wearing SDF or SPG uniforms - well, that was war for you.
Doppler Corp prided itself on its neutrality, after all. Why limit your market to only one side of any conflict?
Weapons sales alone had never been so good.
'What do we have?' he asked his aide - a tall man in the neutral grey of the Masked Men, his face obscured by the metal mask - in actuality a controlling device engineered by their chief of research. Quite often useful prisoners needed a little persuasion to co-operate. The masks ensured their compliance, and rarely needed to be worn for more than a few months.
Most men broke in a matter of weeks. And if they didn't… well, the masks had another function - recording the skills and memories of the wearer for downloading into clones.
Good help was, after all, so hard to find…
'Three hundred. Mostly soldiers, but a handful of engineers. Twenty-eight women of prime breeding age, seventeen others marginal.' Through the impassive mask, the voice sounded heavily modulated and devoid of emotion.
'Have the women sent to the breeding units, gene-tested and scanned. Any meeting our criteria who are confirmed fertile are to be held pending the next shipment to Shaitan. Non-fertile females to be reserved for the brothels, the rest held for insemination.' He looked down at the mass of filthy, stinking, ragged prisoners. 'That one - the red-head. Reserve her if she proves acceptable, and have her cleaned up and sent to my quarters.' The woman in question was tall and graceful, and not even the remnants of an SDF captain's uniform could hide a shapely figure. As if aware of his gaze she looked up, and he smiled coldly, enjoying the way her vivid green eyes widened in fear as she realised his intent. But savouring the moment was brief, as one of the fleet officers hovering near the small group of women moved in front of her, breaking his line of sight.
Harken huffed under his breath. A meaningless gesture of chivalry. What did the man think he could do? Take on the entire facility with his bare hands? He was about to turn away, when something about the young officer caught his attention. The woman he'd moved to protect was tall, but the man stood easily a head taller, several inches more than the men around him, including a turbaned sikh hovering nearby cradling his left arm. Dark eyes glared up at him from under a mop of untidy brown hair, stringy and lank and hanging in rats' tails around a face of extraordinary masculine beauty. Or it would have been if not marred by a scar than ran from his jaw across his left cheek to his nose, which had been broken recently.
He also sported a black eye and a split lip.
'Number eighty-seven - who is that?'
The masked man followed the pointing finger and his eyes, barely visible inside the eye slits of the mask narrowed slightly to review the heads-up display implanted over his eyes. 'A Solar System Fleet captain - one Albrecht Klaus Maria Sebastian Franz Schenk von Stauffenberg according to the files. Captain of the Yukikaze. Cognomen: Harlock.'
The ship name sounded familiar. Harken took a moment, still staring into those defiant eyes, and eventually placed it. 'That's an Arcadia Industries prototype… designed by that sawed-off little midget Oyama... ' He called down his own display, and quickly flicked through the intel that had accompanied this last batch of prisoners. 'Most of these were taken at the Battle of El Alamein. The Yukikaze…' he found the file he was looking for. 'Ah…' He cleared the display and swept the hangar floor, searching for one face in the crowd.
It wasn't hard to find. The files had identified several of the men as being survivors from the Yukikaze, including the sikh and a burly thug in a lieutenant's uniform. Next to them, wrapped in an old brown blanket over the tattered remnants of his engineer's jacket stood a short, stocky young man wearing anachronistic thick glasses, the right lens of which was cracked like crazy paving.
'Oyama Toshiro…' he murmured.
If he'd thought the young giant with the fierce eyes had looked angry before, he'd been wrong. Those dark eyes now glared at him with a murderous fury, and he moved to stand closer to the small man, placing an arm around his shoulders and pushing him back into the crowd.
Harken stared down into the hangar, amused. Really, what did he think that would achieve? There was nowhere they could hide…
More to the point, he couldn't possibly have known what Harken was looking for, could he?
Harken smiled, and turned to the masked man still standing impassively at his side. 'Get me a warp feed to Jupiter - secure channel to Director Hechi.' He allowed his grin to spread as he stared down into the massed prisoners. 'Tell him I have something he wants - very, very badly…'
It might just be his ticket off this rock.