by Terry Mixon
When Luck Runs Out
Book Thirteen of The Empire of Bones Saga
Terry Mixon
Contents
When Luck Runs Out
Also by Terry Mixon
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Also by Terry Mixon
About Terry
When Luck Runs Out
Book Thirteen of The Empire of Bones Saga
by
Terry Mixon
After years of battle, Kelsey Bandar and Jared Mertz are finally ready to face the master AI enslaving the Terran Empire. With just a bit of luck, this nightmare will finally be over.
Only luck can run out just when you need it the most.
Outnumbered and outgunned, they must salvage victory from certain defeat. Failure means extermination, invasion, and the loss of everyone they love. Can they beat the odds just one more time?
Victory on Terra
Copyright © 2020 by Terry Mixon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including information storage and/or retrieval systems, or dissemination of any electronic version, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review, and except where permitted by law.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by Yowling Cat Press ®
Digital edition date: 11/12/2020
Print ISBN: 978-1947376366
Large Print ISBN: 978-1947376373
Cover art - image copyrights as follows:
DepositPhotos|Ivankmit
Dreamstime | Philcold
Dreamstime | Marciomauro
Luca Oleastri
Donna Mixon
Cover design and composition by Donna Mixon
Print edition design and layout by Terry Mixon
Also by Terry Mixon
You can always find the most up to date listing of Terry’s titles on his Amazon Author Page.
The Empire of Bones Saga
Empire of Bones
Veil of Shadows
Command Decisions
Ghosts of Empire
Paying the Price
Recon in Force
Behind Enemy Lines
The Terra Gambit
Hidden Enemies
Race to Terra
Ruined Terra
Victory on Terra
When Luck Runs Out
The Humanity Unlimited Saga
Liberty Station
Freedom Express
Tree of Liberty
Blood of Patriots
The Imperial Marines Saga
Spoils of War
The Fractured Republic Saga
Storm Divers
The Scorched Earth Saga
Scorched Earth
Omnibus Volumes
The Empire of Bones Saga Volume 1
The Empire of Bones Saga Volume 2
The Empire of Bones Saga Volume 3
Humanity Unlimited Publisher’s Pack 1
The Vigilante Series with Glynn Stewart
Heart of Vengeance
Oath of Vengeance
Bound By Law
Bound By Honor
Bound By Blood
Want to get updates from Terry about new books and other general nonsense going on in his life? He promises there will be cats. Go to TerryMixon.com/Mailing-List and sign up.
Dedication
This book would not be possible without the love and support of my beautiful wife. Donna, I love you more than life itself.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank the folks that support me on Patreon. You got to read this book as I was writing it and that kept me working. You have my deepest thanks.
In particular, I want to thank those patrons that supported me at the $10 level and above:
Bryan Barnes
Dave Dolan
David Goldstein
Eugene Humbert
Christian A. Michelsen
John Page
Keith Ramsey
Carl Rumbolo
Dale Thompson
Raymond Wang
Clark Williams
Finally, I want to thank my readers for putting up with me. You guys are great.
1
“Are we ready to flip?” Kelsey Bandar asked from behind Persephone’s command seat. There wasn’t much room on the cramped bridge of the Marine Raider strike ship—which only held three control consoles—but they were all friends.
Until half a year ago, Persephone had been hers. Now Angela Ellis, one of her closest friends, was in command. She had to admit that Angela was far better suited to the task than she had been.
Her friend had really grown into the role since they’d escaped Terra. Any uncertainty the woman might’ve initially had about commanding a warship was long gone. Now she was a confident leader in charge of a well-trained crew.
Persephone wasn’t working solo anymore, either. They’d linked up with Jared’s fleet a month after they’d escaped from Terra. If push came to shove, they could now fight. At least they could when they weren’t scouting.
They’d left that security behind and were now three flips away from support. Admittedly, they could get back to the fleet in just a few minutes because of the peculiar nature of the multiflip point network, but they’d be unable to communicate except with low-speed FTL coms.
That was something they’d only use if they had to. The gravitic pulses it used were hard to detect, but not impossible, and they dared not even hint at the technology to the AIs or their enslaved humans.
Carl Owlet turned in response to her question. As the resident scientific genius, he was still figuring out how the multiflip points worked. Thankfully, he’d made some progress as they’d crept ever closer to Twilight River, the home of the master AI that held the remains of the old Terran Empire in thrall.
“The probe we sent through the branch just popped back and reports that the other side is clear, but it picked up activity in the system. Nothing close enough to detect our arrival, though.”
“Send the probe back and then take us through the flip point, Angela,” Kelsey said. “You know the drill.”
“Helm, make it happen,” the big woman commanded. “Verify all systems are set to stealth nominal. We don’t want to give the locals any indication that we’ve arrived.”
“All systems verified, Major,” Senior Lieutenant Jack Thompson responded. “Flipping the ship.”
There was a b
rief churning inside Kelsey’s gut before they vanished from one system and appeared in another, having traversed the distance between them instantly. Thankfully, her Marine Raider augmentation made the process a lot less disorienting than it had once been.
As they appeared in the new system, no one said a word, and the ship began launching additional probes to gather information about the system without giving away their presence.
It would take hours for the stealthed probes to determine who was in the system and what they were doing, but the location of the system itself should be easy enough to identify based on the starfield.
“Fiona,” Kelsey said, glancing toward the ceiling. “Can you tell us where we are?”
“I’m working on that, Colonel,” the artificial intelligence said through the ship’s speakers. “I anticipate having our location dialed in within the next few minutes.”
Fiona had chosen to present herself as female even though she had no biological body. Like Marcus, the AI aboard Jared’s flagship Invincible, and Harrison, the AI running the shipyards on Boxer Station at Harrison’s World, she was made up of the same hardware as the AIs they were fighting.
The only difference was that Carl had scrubbed their core rules of all the homicidal nastiness that the master AI had built into its own brood. He’d also inserted a core rule that the AIs had to obey orders from herself or Jared.
She still wasn’t sure that had been the best decision, but it was done and couldn’t be undone without unraveling their personalities, so they’d all have to live with his choice.
Jared Mertz, her brother—technically her half brother, even though they shared no genetic link whatsoever—and the commander of this expedition, had remained with the fleet in a system that wasn’t on any of the old Imperial maps.
To the best of their knowledge, humanity had never discovered the star or the pristine world that orbited dead center of its habitable zone. That was a real loss for humanity, because the world rivaled Avalon or Terra in its beauty. Her husband, Russ Talbot, was leading an exploratory mission down to its surface even now.
Kelsey returned her thoughts to the mission at hand. She was glad that they were able to get away for a little while. It really strained one’s nerves to have to slip through the Rebel Empire—the AI-enslaved remnants of the old Terran Empire—with an entire fleet of ships while hoping that no one noticed your passage.
As a Marine Raider strike ship, Persephone’s hull was coated with materials that were difficult to detect. In addition to that, she had stealth fields that they could throw over her hull to absorb incoming scans. Unless someone was right on top of them, they’d have no idea that she was there at all.
The protection wasn’t perfect, of course. The closer Persephone got to an actively scanning enemy, the higher the chances she’d be noticed.
Their most significant risk of discovery during this particular mission was random patrols that might inadvertently come across them once they’d flipped into a system but before they’d had a chance to get the lay of the land.
Based on what she’d seen so far, the Rebel Empire was taking nothing for granted. The AIs had destroyers in a lot of systems doing exactly that. So far as they knew, the AIs didn’t suspect the existence of flip points that didn’t fit the standard model, which at least made what they were doing possible.
Multiflip points occurred in roughly the same area of a system as regular flip points—which meant they were mostly spread out between the habitable zone and the innermost gas giants—but they were much more difficult to detect.
Far flip points sat way out in the outer system, and were as detectable as regular flip points, but no one had ever bothered searching for flip points at so great a distance from a star. They were also like regular flip points in that they could only go to a single destination, but part of their unusual nature was that the distance traversed was significantly greater than a regular flip point.
Where a standard flip point might allow a ship to go up to a couple of hundred light-years, a far flip point could reach an average of a thousand. The shortest one they’d found thus far had been over seven hundred light-years. The longest had been more than thirteen hundred.
Still, to her mind, it was the multiflip points that were the most interesting. She didn’t know how they worked because Carl hadn’t finalized a working theory yet, but they were devilishly difficult to detect. Also, depending on the frequency generated by the flip drive, they could potentially take you to different destinations through what he called branches, using a tree metaphor.
More interestingly, when you arrived at the destination multiflip point, it could, in turn, take you to even more destinations. Without leaving the section of space around the multiflip point, a ship that had mapped the various branches could flip three or four times in the space of a couple of minutes and visit as many systems.
One of the dangers they’d discovered was that some of those branches only allowed for a limited amount of tonnage, and it might vary depending on the direction you were traversing a branch. It might allow for a cruiser to make the trip out but limit the return to a destroyer. Or no ship at all.
That had to do with the energy distribution inside the branches of the multiflip point network and was why mapping was critical. They had to probe each branch carefully to get an idea of how much tonnage it would allow so that they wouldn’t be stranded on the other side if they used it.
Another one of Carl’s inventions had made the process somewhat easier. He’d created an external frequency modulator that could be installed on an existing flip drive that would allow it to take them through branches that might not otherwise be traversable.
He’d also designed a flip drive that could do the work much more precisely and even had one built at a Rebel Empire shipyard. That had taken a covert mission and acquired them some allies in the process. That specialized flip drive was now a resident aboard the Fleet carrier Audacious.
She and her commanding officer, Commodore Zia Anderson, were separated from the fleet because of one of those one-way branches, and Kelsey was worried about the woman and her crew. Zia was working with the resistance inside the Rebel Empire, but she didn’t have any support from the fleet or the New Terran Empire.
Kelsey hoped that things were okay with them and their unplanned guest. Kelsey’s mother, the former empress of the New Terran Empire, had stowed away to be with Kelsey at the start of her mission and had decided to remain with the resistance and act as an ambassador for the New Terran Empire.
What could possibly go wrong with that?
Kelsey just hoped that Justine Bandar didn’t sleep with the wrong person. When it came to affairs, her mother didn’t have much common sense, though Kelsey’s biological sire was a powerful and canny Imperial senator, one who’d bled to prove his loyalty to the emperor and the Empire.
“I’ve identified this system,” Fiona said. “It was never permanently occupied by humans and thus never given a colloquial name, so it’s listed in the Imperial Catalog as Y-73598F-8A. The star is an unremarkable red dwarf, and there are no listed resources of note. It does, however, have one intriguing feature.”
The main screen changed from a view of space to a map of the flip lines around Twilight River. One of the systems near their target began blinking.
“Y-73598F-8A is two flips away from Twilight River. This particular branch of the multiflip point network has brought us significantly closer to the master AI than any of our previous explorations. In fact, based on the signal traffic that I’m picking up inside the system, I believe that it hosts a significant defensive force.”
“That’s good,” Angela said with a relieved smile. “The closest we’d gotten before was five systems out, and even that had a sizable picket force of destroyers. This will allow us to get an idea of how much protection the master AI has layered around itself. If it isn’t too significant, the fallback plan of forcing our way into Twilight River using Admiral Mertz’s fleet might work.�
�
“I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you,” Kelsey warned. “This thing has had five centuries to build up its defenses. Each layer inside this onion is going to be tougher than the last. Whatever we find here will just be a tithe of what’s in the next system, and Twilight River itself will be worse yet.”
That was a grim forecast but one that she honestly believed. If it came to the point that they couldn’t slip into Twilight River through a back door, she seriously doubted that they’d be able to get into it at all.
“Thank you, Debbie Downer,” Carl muttered loudly enough for everyone to hear.
She smiled slightly as everyone else chuckled. The scientist was irrepressible.
“Carl, honey, use your inside voice,” Angela told her husband.
Kelsey still had trouble imagining the big marine woman and the slight scientist being a couple, but she supposed it wasn’t any more outlandish than her and Talbot. She was smaller than most women, much less Carl, while Talbot was bigger than Angela. Quite the visual mismatch.
The young man grinned at his wife. “I had to lighten the mood a bit. I’m starting to get a better idea of how the multiflip point network is laid out, and I think there’s a good chance that we’re going to find a branch that leads where we want to go.
