by Terry Mixon
Annette considered that. “Is there any kind of remote activator?”
The doctor nodded. “Almost certainly. Overwriting the implant code will probably make it safe for her to speak, but I’m not sure what to do about remote signals. Those will continue to be a danger.”
“Something else for Sir Carl to work on. Who knows? We might be able to get the researchers working on fixing the problem themselves. There’s a kind of symmetry in that.”
She went over and exchanged small talk with the scientist for the next two hours. That was challenging, considering she knew very little about the woman’s society as a whole or the life of a restricted researcher in particular.
The theme that emerged was that while Jacqueline’s education was quite broad and, in specific fields, very deep, she didn’t get out much. It seemed that she and the other scientists kept each other’s company more often than not.
Basically, they were prisoners. If Annette was right in her guess, this had been true for the woman’s entire life. Considering that they hadn’t found any retired scientists, the Rebel Empire probably disposed of them once they couldn’t work. Dead women told no tales.
Annette excused herself and went for sandwiches and tea. She figured the other woman would be hungry by the time this was all done.
The procedure was complete by the time she returned. She set up the food in the closest break room and brought Jacqueline Parker to join her.
“Okay, let me start off by telling you what we were really doing,” Annette said.
The other woman smiled a little. “I figured that was taking too long for any kind of realistic scan.”
“Since the device is rigged to be controlled by your implants, we overwrote the code with the base version that doesn’t have the interfaces to do anything with it,” Annette said. “In other words, the code running your implants now has no idea the explosives are there or what should set them off.
“The doctor is uncertain if they can be safely removed, but nothing we discuss should pose any danger to you at this point. One other piece of bad news is that they may also be remotely controllable. While we have everyone on lockdown, I think it might be best if we bring all of your people off the orbital just to be safe.”
“I think that’s a great idea,” Parker said. “You have no idea how it feels to have them watching you all the time. To know that if you made a mistake, you’d be dead before you realized it.”
“I can’t imagine how they recruit people for this kind of job,” Annette said. “If they don’t let you out to talk to anyone else, the whole concept of pay seems ludicrous.”
“We aren’t paid for our work,” the woman said bluntly. “We never had a choice about what we wanted to do with our lives. All of us were brought in as children and trained for this work. But even with all the negatives, it’s still better than where we came from.”
Annette frowned a little. “I don’t think I understand.”
“We all came from an exceptionally primitive society. One where we were taken as very young children and separated from what amounted to savages. Thankfully, most of our memories of that time aren’t very clear, but it was a brutal life.”
Everything suddenly clicked, and Annette knew where these people came from. The tithes of children the computer at Erorsi had been trading for the high-tech gear from the Rebel Empire. That had to be where the scientists had come from.
She wondered if the Rebel Empire had done so because no one would miss those people. Now wasn’t the time to ask, but it did call for some deeper research later.
Based on what she’d seen, Annette thought the woman was understating the benefits of living on the orbital in comparison to being a Pale One. The woman didn’t even know what was done to those that stayed as they grew older.
“I might be able to provide a little information about where you came from,” Annette said. “If my guesses are correct in any case. What I need to know is if you’re willing to have a frank discussion with me about what you were working on. Now that it’s safe to do so.”
Jacqueline Parker smiled coldly. “I’ve been under a death sentence my entire life. I’ll tell you everything I know if you can get my people out of this place.”
13
Veronica sat alone in her quarters trying to wrap her mind around just how screwed they really were. She and her people had stayed up late into the evening discussing their situation and looking through the massive library of data that their captors had made available to them.
It hadn’t taken long to realize the sheer volume of information available—exabytes of material—meant that not all of it could be fake.
The library dated back literally centuries. Millions of hours of vids, news shows, and more. Billions of articles, books, textbooks and academic journals for restricted research subjects, and more.
And a mind-boggling amount of virtual-reality porn stashed in various hidden repositories. Even some ancient pieces which looked to be live action with actual participants. Which begged the obvious question. Why would anyone include something like that?
She’d set her people to reading different articles about the war against the old dictatorship.
After a few hours, a disturbing trend appeared. What they were reading did not match up with what she had learned in school. Of course, this could all be propaganda. If so, someone had invested an incredible amount of work to trick people that couldn’t do anything about it in the first place.
It made no sense. These people had already demonstrated they had enough firepower to take out an entire Fleet task force. Why try to convince her the lords had been playing some kind of game with humanity?
She stayed awake late, picking random historical areas to poke her nose into. It made her sick to her stomach, having to read the lies about the old dictatorship. And they had to be lies. She refused to believe that the lords had overthrown humanity and now oppressed them in a slavery so pervasive they couldn’t even recognize it.
It was later than normal when she woke. She dressed and ate breakfast with her senior officers in the little kitchen their suite shared.
Many of them had burned the midnight oil as well. All of them seemed uneasy.
She laid out the areas she’d researched more closely and listened to them as they detailed their own finds.
Her chief engineer, Lieutenant Graham Bakersfield, summed up her thoughts in his usual blunt manner. “Something stinks.”
Lieutenant Commander Armand Fuller, her executive officer, glared at the engineer. “Watch yourself.”
The younger officer raised an eyebrow. “About what, Commander? It’s all laid out for anyone to see. They don’t have any reason to lie to us. It’s not as though we can do anything. They destroyed our entire task force.”
Veronica rapped the table with her knuckles. “Let’s restrain ourselves. We don’t have any idea what their true plans are. Let’s not make assumptions.”
She added her helm officer, Lieutenant Candice Wells, and her tactical officer, Lieutenant Brent Kowalski, into her instructions with a pointed glance.
“What I want each of you to do today is divide up the various areas we’ve already looked at and start reading everything you can about them. I want an assessment of how authentic these documents look. As Graham said, there’s far too much material here for them to have just created everything out of whole cloth. I want to know if it feels consistent.”
She gave them all a stern look. “What I don’t want is for there to be any fighting amongst ourselves. We’re already in enough trouble.”
After sending each of them off to their own corners, she again dug into every bit of information she could about the dictator, Marcus Bandar. From everything she’d learned in school, the man had been a monster. Surely, they couldn’t whitewash him so completely.
By lunch, she was feeling much less certain of that viewpoint. Of course, she’d been certain going into this that they would censor anything negative about the man. The nar
rative she’d learned as a child didn’t suit this story at all.
Yet she found plenty of criticism. Any number of people seemed to object to some aspect of the man’s rulings. It seemed, based on the record she had in front of her, that anyone could criticize the man about anything. Not just privately, but on what passed for news programs.
Diving down the rabbit hole of watching news programs to see if they seemed real had caused her to question everything she’d believed. Just one of the news programs went back many decades before the rebellion against the old dictatorship. She had copies of every evening newscast.
There was absolutely no way that someone had spent the time to fake everything in it, not even the lords.
She picked dozens of news items at random. Both good and bad. Most times, she was able to verify through other sources that the events the news programs covered were consistent with what was being presented in them.
Oh, the opinions of the people on the shows might be at odds with the facts, but it wasn’t difficult to discern their individual agendas. Anyone that served in Fleet had to play politics, even if they detested being anywhere near the higher orders.
By the time her stomach informed her that she needed something to eat, she wasn’t sure she wanted to. She felt ill. No wonder Captain Levy seemed so confident and serene. She was finding it difficult to refute the evidence.
That still didn’t mean it was true. It could be some elaborate ruse used to dupe Levy and his people. If so, someone had gone to an insane amount of trouble to fake the historical record for these people. That seemed even more far-fetched. Why?
She wasn’t sure what to believe anymore.
Rather than dine with the rest of her people, she decided to see if she could get another trip to the officers’ mess. She signaled at the hatch and smiled at the marine who opened it.
He stood far enough back that he wasn’t in danger of being rushed, and his companions had them covered from farther down the corridor.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“I was wondering if it is acceptable for me to take lunch at the officers’ mess, Corporal.”
The marine nodded. “Captain Levy left orders that allow it, ma’am. If you’ll stay inside, I’ll summon two marines to escort you. Do you want me to notify the captain to join you?”
She shook her head. “No, Corporal. I think I’d rather dine alone. I just want to see and hear the people around me.”
“Understood, ma’am. Please step back into your quarters.”
Ten minutes later, the hatch opened again. Two new marines stood waiting for her. “This way, ma’am,” one of them said politely. The woman gestured for Veronica to precede her.
They escorted her to the officers’ mess. It looked pretty much as it had the last time she’d been there. A fairly chaotic room of people dining and talking.
One person stood out, however. A man with commander’s tabs dining at a table against the wall, with a pair of marine guards of his own.
She stopped and eyed him. She knew all the senior officers of her task force. He wasn’t one of them.
“Who is that man?” she asked the marine at her side.
“One of the new prisoners. They just came aboard yesterday. He’s from the orbital at Dresden.”
Veronica stared at the woman in shock. None of them had explicitly said where the task force had come from. This had to be some trick to try to get information from her.
Only, how was that supposed to work?
“I’ve changed my mind,” Veronica said. “I think I’ll dine with him. Unless of course, you have an objection.” She stared challengingly at the marine.
The woman shrugged. “Nothing in my orders precludes that, ma’am. After you.”
Raul was about halfway through his meal when he saw the woman stalking toward him with a determined step. She was new. Her rank tabs indicated she was a commander, and marines flanked her.
Under other circumstances, he might think she was coming to arrest him. That seemed somewhat redundant at this point.
He put his fork down and focused his attention politely on her. “Yes?”
“Might I join you, Commander?”
He gestured toward the seat across from him. “Be my guest. Might I suggest the steak? It’s quite good.”
Once the woman had seated herself, the marines that had been accompanying her joined those watching him. Curious.
“I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Raul Castille.”
She extended her hand. “Veronica Giguere. Commanding officer of the destroyer R-7322.”
That prompted him to check his implant storage. That was one of the destroyers formally assigned to guard Dresden. It was one of the ships that had departed a few weeks before the intruders had showed up.
As the orbital’s security officer, he had files on all the senior officers assigned in the system. Indeed, he had hers.
It only took a few moments for him to conclude she was the real deal. Her personnel file had a number of images that his captors would not have been able to alter.
He smiled. “I’m actually familiar with you, Commander. I am—rather, I used to be—the chief security officer for the Dresden orbital. We never personally met, but I have reviewed your file. I’m surprised to see you here.”
“I’m not even sure where here is, Commander. My crew and I have been prisoners aboard this ship for three weeks. Are we at Dresden?”
“I’m not certain where we are, either,” Raul said. “The only thing I can say for sure is that I don’t believe we need to be so formal with one another. We’re both prisoners together, you and I. Call me Raul. May I call you Veronica?”
“I suppose so.”
The same man who’d taken his order stepped up to the table and offered Veronica a menu. She shook her head. “I’ll take what he’s having.”
Once the server had departed, she stared at Raul. “How did they get you? Were you traveling on some ship they ambushed? They seem to be quite good at ambushes.”
He gave her a wan smile. “On that point, I believe we agree. No. They captured the orbital entirely. Then they proceeded to steal it. What about the task force you were with? Did they only get your ship? Were some of the others able to get away?”
Veronica stared at him, her mouth open for a moment before she snapped it shut. “You’ve got to be kidding me! How could they possibly steal the Dresden orbital? The system is guarded! There are battle stations at every flip point. Surely you saw them coming.”
He laughed. “Yes, well, I’d imagine my next performance evaluation is going to be a trial. Probably quite literally. I’m still not certain how they managed it, but they snuck into the system without anyone being the wiser. It was as though they magically appeared on the orbital. There were marines in powered armor everywhere.
“We never had a chance. Once they were inside our guard, they stunned everyone with the orbital’s antiboarding weapons. They took the ship we used for moving ore, modified it to hold the orbital, and somehow got away with it. I was unconscious at the time, so I’m not sure how they managed that, but they did it. What about your task force? What happened?”
Veronica sighed and sagged a little in her chair. “We made it to the target system. The one with the crazy computer. Commodore Wilson split the task force and led the smaller portion to ambush the computer. Commodore Crabtree—his deputy—led the larger portion to take the system next door. My ship was with the latter group.
“Only they were waiting for us. They took out the pickets we left behind to keep the exit open, and then ships inside the computer’s system jumped the freighter and its escort. Commodore Wilson went after them, but they took him out.”
She rubbed her forehead. “I didn’t see it happen. Commodore Crabtree pushed forward and flipped into the other system. They were supposed to be primitive, relatively speaking. Only they weren’t. They had a fleet bigger than ours waiting on the other side. Huge ships. Modern ships. A lot of them.
&nb
sp; “They had old battle stations guarding the flip point that absorbed our initial fire. I think they were decoys. Only two light cruisers and six destroyers made it back out.”
He let that sink in. “I see. And what did you find when you got back to the computer’s system?”
“They destroyed Commodore Wilson’s section of the task force. They were waiting for us too. Commodore Crabtree died during the assault on that third system. The two remaining light cruisers died trying to take out this carrier.
“All six of the destroyers that were left were damaged and obviously outclassed. When they offered to accept our surrender, I gave in. As a security officer, that’s probably not what you wanted to hear.”
He allowed himself to shrug. “I’m not precisely in a position to judge. Only six destroyers survived? That’s terrible. You mentioned other ships. How many and of what classes?”
“They had a fifty percent numerical advantage,” the woman said, pain written across her face. “They also had a number of significantly larger ships. Not only heavy cruisers, but also things they call battlecruisers and two monster ships the same size as this carrier they called superdreadnoughts. We never stood a chance.”
Raul leaned back in his chair masking his shock. The carrier had been a terrible surprise to him, but this news undercut everything he thought he knew. He’d been toying with the idea that his captors were lying to him. Now he could no longer afford to delude himself.
If they possessed fleets of that caliber—ones they hadn’t felt the need to use at Dresden—then their story must be true. Some version of it anyway. They must actually be a splinter group of the old dictatorship that escaped the rebellion.
The Empire was in serious trouble. He wasn’t sure what he could do, but he had to come up with some kind of plan. He couldn’t just sit back and let them get away with this.
The classified research they’d stolen not only helped them, but its loss hurt the Empire. As far as Raul knew, Dresden was the only place that manufactured Raider implants. Those would be terrible in battle.
