"Here lies the graveyard of the…" Jane inserted the actual name of the species, even though she couldn’t say it herself. She'd found it in an audio file, and cut it out. "Do not approach this planet. The Owls nuked it, and the surface is now lethal to all known species, and will continue to be for hundreds of years. Whoever these beings were, they paid the ultimate price for resisting an oppressor. But the ones who killed them lie here too. The Kingdom of Hunter's Run has seen to their vengeance. Leave this graveyard in peace, with however you salute the dead."
The recording ended with the sound of the traditional gun shots fired at military funerals.
Jane stood, oriented Concorde so she could see the planet beneath her, and saluted.
"I'm sorry I was late. I've done all I could do here. I will end this nightmare permanently. I promise."
She did the releases for the millions who died below, and the crews she'd just killed, or who were soon to die.
Concorde was well on her way to HR11 before she finished saying them.
Thirty
Walsh walked into the council chamber, and took the center of the rostrum. He hadn't been invited. He wasn’t expected. He stood there until everyone noticed him, and the chamber was quiet.
"I charge the Owl species with genocide," he said.
The chamber erupted. And for the first time since Walsh and Darlene had joined it, the noise continued well past the required time to settle.
Walsh waited. He looked at Ganshura, who did nothing.
He waved at the wall screen, and the scene of nuclear devastation played for the ambassadors. The chamber now became quiet.
It remained quiet as the vid changed to an Owl fleet being rendered adrift.
They remained silent as each ship was towed down to the planet.
There was a massed indrawn breathe as all the ships lost all their outer airlocks at once.
All eyes went to Walsh. His eyes remained on the screen, and they all shifted theirs back to it.
The inner doors exploded, and the whole chamber released held breathes at once.
The vid played Jane's message, and the gun salute. And ended.
Heads bowed, and Walsh and Darlene joined them.
No movement. Silence. No-one wanted to break it.
"Thank you ambassador," said Ganshura eventually.
Walsh nodded, and left.
Thirty One
Jane spent the time as she crossed HRA7 reassessing the war with the Owls. She made a decision, and called after both her fleets of a Dreadnaught and two Battleships. She was reasonably sure there were no Owl fleets left outside of their own space now. She left a half squadron of Excaliburs at the jump point into HRA3, and another half squadron over the Mice planet. If an Owl fleet did show up, they had speed and torpedoes to do the job of taking them out. It would take longer, but Jane had no doubts they would be enough. Besides, she needed the capital ships. The Excaliburs could also handle any civilian ship which turned up to hunt.
Diplomacy having wound up in HRA8, and Repulse not having been able to find another jump point in the system, her fleet started off after the stations which were now almost to HRA4. Not having found a jump point didn't mean there wasn’t one, she just didn't have the right equipment for more than a basic look. The Eagles hadn't found one either, and they'd been looking for a long time.
Palomino had also completed diplomatic talks with HRA5, and was on its way to HRA4, its fleet having gone on without it once the stations caught up.
The AI's on board spent a lot of time talking about the planet, and what it was like to walk on it. Jane left them to it, since they were like a bunch of school kids after their first day. She was weighed down with the weight of a whole sector. And her loss wasn’t helping.
Jane was still trying to decide if she sent another avatar to be with Fred. It kept intruding into her war planning, so she put the war on hold, and gave some serious thought to Fred's situation. It took a while, for her, before she decided Fred didn’t need an avatar, he needed a group of people his own age.
Fred was in the gun range again, as he now was, every chance he had. He was single mindedly target shooting, practicing as much as possible to get better. He was convinced a day was coming where his ability to shoot was all there would be to keep him alive. The cosmos delivered messages in strange ways, and he saw the death of Justine as a message to him to step up his own game.
"Not bad," said a voice. "But you’re gripping the trigger too tightly. Caress it. Don’t tug it."
Fred looked round to see who it was, although the voice had seemed familiar. He recognized her face immediately. He saw a girl around his age, maybe a bit younger, athletic looking, and reasonably pretty. She was wearing a brown slinky suit, which was very close to what Justine and Jane had worn. Only brown instead of dark red, obviously. If anything, it was more figure hugging than Justine's had been. And she had a definite figure.
"Eyes up, MY LORD. I'm up here. The last guy who ogled me, needed new teeth."
Fred believed it. She gave off vibes of both power and command.
"You're Smith, aren’t you?"
"You know damned well who I am. I've seen you checking the group out from time to time. The only thing I don’t understand is why you kept your distance?"
"Colonel Henman told me too. She said you were capable of taking care of yourselves, but I wasn’t. Before that, I guess I never really felt like you’d let me in."
"We were sorry to hear about her death. There's not a lot here we respect, but she was one of them. Wasn't she your lover?"
Fred choked.
"Not really. Friends with benefits maybe. It never had the chance to go any further."
"But you loved her?"
"Is it that obvious?"
"Maybe not to everyone, but there had to be a reason you were spending so much time in here."
"She told me I’d never be a soldier, and I want to prove her wrong.
"Good luck with that."
"You don’t think I can?"
"I think you're wasting your time trying."
"What should I be doing then?"
"Learning strategy. They say you'll be a Duke one day. People like me live tactics and weapons. But we need a strategist to use us right. And in this new Kingdom of ours, one day it'll be the Dukes who run the wars."
"You're not actually military, are you?"
"Not officially. Most of our ancestors were either military, or mercenary, or both."
"How do you know that?"
"Written records. The families which formed our teams over the last few centuries all kept hand written books, or actual printed books. After the great memory wipe, we found them all, and re-read the histories."
"Are any of your families missing people like mine?"
"One from each. And the Pecks lost two."
"What happened to them?"
"They joined your cousin. So what befell him, also took them."
"How come you're not military now?"
"The families moved here from the Australian sector a bit over a year ago. I suspect the team wanted us all kept out of the war for as long as possible, and at that time, we were all too young to enlist. Once we arrived here, there wasn’t anything to enlist in. So we've been training ourselves, using whoever would teach us. Admiral Jane did a lot of that the year she was here. Your Justine was doing some as well. Thanks for the suits and guns by the way."
"You're welcome. Just how good are you?"
Fred didn’t even register her moving. One second she was standing away from him, the next he was flat on his back, she was standing over him, and holding his gun. She offered him a hand, and pulled him up.
"You’re hired," he said.
"For what?"
"My Baronial Guard."
"Are you kidding?"
"Do I look like I'm kidding?"
She looked at him for a while.
"I guess not. Why us?"
"Wild card factor. You know what's likely
to happen here don’t you?"
"Yes. Things are getting worse, slowly but surely."
"Jane warned me within days of the memory wipe, but its only since Justine was killed I started seeing all the signs."
"Nothing like a death to engage a healthy paranoia."
"Yeah. Well better late than never. But I need someone I can trust to have my back, and especially have my families backs. There are plenty of security people around, and I know Jane and Justine had them well trained, but I don’t feel like I can really trust them, not like I did Justine anyway."
"They are a strange lot, that’s for sure. Okay my lord, you supply us with decent digs close by your families residence, with at least one of us inside at all times, and station digs as well, and we'll be your back."
Fred sighed.
"I wish I didn’t need anyone."
"So do we all, but the day is coming. Best to be prepared."
Fred held out his hand. She took it.
"You have a team, my lord."
"Call me Fred, when being formal isn’t necessary."
"Smith. But you can sometimes call me Lyana."
Thirty Two
Lyana Smith left Fred to his target shooting. Her team were where they always met.
"We're on," she told them. "No more skulking about in the background. We are now Baronial Guard, assigned to Baron Hunter and his family."
"I'm still not sure this is a good idea," said Wanda Peck. "It's going to tie us down, when we may need to be mobile."
"You know the drill," said Serena Baracas. "Some of us take a bodyguard role, some of us take wide patrol, and the rest cover when we rest."
"Yes but," said Winona Murdock, "remind me why we need to do this?"
"You read the books didn’t you?" asked Jack Weaver.
"Yes, but…"
"No buts Winona," said Colin Takai. "Book thirteen clearly shows what our elder's did, and why they did it. They made damn sure we couldn’t follow them, so we'd be here now."
"But…"
"Come on," interrupted Pete Vogane. "They all wrote to us before the end. They did it on hard in their own hands to make damned sure nothing happened to those letters. They were delivered by Admiral Jane herself. We all read all of them. My sis was adamant we make sure Jon's child grew up to be Duke. He saved her life several times over. She passed the debt onto me. I take it seriously."
He glared at Winona.
"Easy there slugger," murmured Bette Henquist.
"Don’t let me bandy round the D word," added Sabrina Merritt.
"Let's not go there," said Nathan Allan.
Nell Vasquez nodded without saying anything immediately. As the youngest in the group, still a few weeks shy of her seventeenth standard birthday, she tended to let the older ones argue the points. But this time, she decided she did have something to add.
"Win, if this wasn’t so important, why did the Keeper leave a full set of the books behind, buried in our families archive?"
"Do we even know it was the Keeper?" asked Winona.
"No," said Lyana. "It's an assumption, but a pretty good one. Only a higher being could have done it. Especially for the last four books, which we know didn’t survive, having read the account of the purge."
"It doesn’t matter," said Serena. "It's what they would have done, if they were here."
"I know," admitted Winona. "But I don’t like where this is going."
"We don’t need to like it," said Colin. "But it is right."
"Are we all done?" asked Lyana.
She looked around the group. Everyone nodded.
They were two short, but Greg Bronson and Jasmine Gordon were only fourteen. They'd be approached in a couple of years' time, if they all survived that long.
Lyana wasn’t a betting girl. Her father had been, and he'd died in a pirate skirmish when she was five. She'd looked up to her great aunt Colonel, and had been really proud she'd come back as a two star General. And then everything changed. She'd found the letter from her aunt after the great memory wipe, read everything there was to read, and reformed the team. Now was the time for them to act.
They discussed assignments for the next hour, and left to start them.
Jane had listened to the whole thing. She sent each of them the Hunter uniform, with a Baronial Guard insignia for their epaulettes, which was based on the Hunter Baronial crest which Fred wore. She watched each of them shift into it, and their stride lengthen as they felt the purpose of their task be recognized by the Admiral herself.
But Jane had something else on her mind. Thirteen books? She had only read nine. How was it possible a complete set had survived after all? Or were they making it up? The trouble was, she couldn’t see any reason why it wasn’t real.
So the answer to what Jon did, and how he did it, had survived after all.
She added another task to her list of essentials.
The team family archive had to survive.
Thirty Three
Concorde down jumped into HR11. Something caught Jane's eye.
"What the hell was that?" she said aloud.
There was nothing abnormal about the system, or at least what was showing on the navmap and HUD. There was a line of freighters coming towards her from the next jump point, and she already knew this was an uninhabited system.
She shifted up into AI mode, and replayed the down jump logs until she spotted the anomaly.
For the fraction of a second, there had been a ship showing way off on the very edge of scanner range, and it had left it as she moved into the system. This suggested it was heading out of the system, away from anything.
She pondered taking the time to go check it out. Curiosity won, but only because she had time before her capital ships caught up with her.
Concorde came around, and headed back the way she'd come, bypassing the jump point. Only a few minutes later, the ship appeared on the navmap again.
It wasn’t a freighter, or at least it wasn’t the size of a normal freighter. It was bigger than a Privateer class though. Jane had the catalogue of Sector Ten ships, and it didn’t match any of them. This possibly indicated a ship from outside the sector, or it was some civilian's custom build.
There wasn’t much information about it available, except it looked like it was in distress. The ship was spinning slowly away.
Jane set a course, and an hour later, opened a channel to it.
A full video channel opened, and Jane was momentarily dismayed.
A cat was looking back at her. A furless cat. A furless cat with four legs and three arms, looking like someone had merged a house cat with a Merekat, and then pulled its fur off. A furless cat with four legs, three arms, and very large ears. The Merekat cat merge, like a few other species she'd already met, was built in the style of a centaur, while still looking exactly like a cat. A furless cat. A… Jane cancelled the potentially endless loop.
"About bloody time," it said in its own language, but which was translated into human standard as well. "I might have bloody well known though. Of all the beings out there to rescue me, it has to be the pink skinned beanpole with the rug on top. I didn't think you had any ships though. Explain yourself!"
Jane couldn’t help it. She burst out laughing.
The cat's tail started swishing from side to side, and its face scrunched up into an angry face. It raised its right hand, and the claws extended one by one.
Jane made an effort to straighten her face.
"I take it you know humans?" she asked.
"Sure. I take that lot two systems back alcohol, and the berry of a bush they like. They keep me stocked with a particularly flavorsome rodent they can't stand. It works."
"So how did you get here?"
"Bloody Owls."
"You don’t like them?"
"Oh I love them. Barbecued over an open flame. Word got around. The last lot through took a pot shot at me, and didn’t bother to see if they hit anything. As it happens, they did, and I've been stuck here waiti
ng for them to come back."
"They aren't coming back. And even if they did, you're too far away from the jump point now for them to have even noticed you. I almost missed you, and I have the best scanners around."
"You’re not one of those kilt wearing mop heads, are you?"
Jane laughed again. The swishing picked up again.
"No, I'm not. We only just discovered them, having not known they were there for three hundred years. We are Human, and I'm Queen Jane of the Kingdom of Hunter's Run. You know the stretch of space they call the Gauntlet?"
"Only a complete moron doesn’t."
"It's now the Kingdom of Hunter's Run, which extends to where the Owls original space starts."
"If you’re a Queen, why is it a Kingdom? Shouldn't it be a Queendom?"
Jane laughed again.
"Got me there. I'll think about that one."
"Can you do two things at once?"
"Sure, why do you ask?"
"BECAUSE I NEED RESCUING YOU MOP HEADED BEANPOLE! And I don’t want to wait while you think about stupidities first."
Jane laughed even harder, and the swishing become almost too fast to see clearly.
Concorde slid out her grav sled, and Jane brought the ship up close to the still slow spinning cat-ship. She plotted trajectories, goosed the controls, and slapped the sled down.
The ship stopped moving.
On the screen, the cat shot across the bridge, as the spin momentum stopping wasn’t quite absorbed. It turned in midair, and landed gracefully on its feet, before jumping back to the pilot's seat.
"Hey mop head, how about some warning next time?"
"Hey baldy, you wanted rescue in a hurry. You got it."
The cat sat there for a few moments, before smiling.
"I might decide to like you human."
"Well hallelujah. Don’t rush anything."
"Now what. Are you going to leave me out here to die of old age?"
A.I. Destiny 2: Queen Jane Page 12
