Empire of Bones

by Terry Mixon

  “Sounds like. We’re at the fusion plant. I’ll call you when I figure it out.”

  Jared turned to his men. “Fan out in pairs. Explore the nearby areas. Be careful.” He singled out one of the men to wait with him.

  He climbed to what he thought was the Captain’s console and studied the man strapped in there. His body was in a very similar condition to the woman they’d found earlier. His uniform indicated he was a full captain, though there wasn’t a nametag. He wore an odd-looking headset. There were no microphones and it didn’t cover his ears. He couldn’t determine its purpose. There was no obvious sign of injury that Jared could see.

  A trip around the bridge told him none of these people had battle wounds, yet they’d all died at their stations. The damage to the ship wasn’t bad enough to kill them here. Or that woman. Something else had caused their deaths. All wore the strange headsets.

  Maybe he could bring the Captain’s console to life and find something. Fleet built all the critical systems on Athena with small power units to operate with if the main systems went offline. Surely the old Empire worried about battle damage taking out the main power grid, too.

  Dust coated the console. He brushed it away with his gloved hand. It was a flat panel, very sleek and futuristic. The irony of thinking that about a 500-year-old wreck made him snort a little.

  He felt around the sides and under the rim for an emergency power switch. He found it on the right side up front where no one could unintentionally hit it, but it was still within easy reach by the Captain.

  The consoled flickered when Jared flipped the recessed switch. He didn’t think it would come on at all, but it slowly brightened. The layout of the virtual controls was unfamiliar to him, though he thought he could figure them out.

  This was a ship’s status screen. The pattern of the red and amber dots formed a ship. Almost all the dots were red so he picked one of the few amber ones toward the aft of the ship. The display expanded at a touch and showed what he guessed was engineering. The dot remained amber, but some text appeared beside it.

  It was the fusion plant. The safety interlocks were disabled. It said so right there. The output was fluctuating and there was a lurid warning about the danger of explosion.

  He opened a channel to the Chief Engineer. “Dennis, I have the Captain’s console up and running. I have a reading on the fusion plant. It says someone overrode the safety interlocks. It has a warning about the output fluctuations.”

  “That’s more than I’m getting here,” the engineer grumbled. “The controls seem fried. At least the displays are. Perhaps that’s why they overrode the interlocks. This plant shouldn’t be operating without the local controls.

  “Are you going to be able to shut it down from there?”

  “Probably not. I’m accessing the video from your helmet cam. That looks bad. I want to shut down the plant right now. You’re going to have to drive for me.”

  Jared felt his stomach flutter. This was all too similar to his nightmare of having to do something in engineering. It never ended well. He took a deep breath. “Talk me through it.”

  “Seriously? As if I know their control systems any better than you do. Tap the amber icon for the fusion plant.”

  A tap opened a menu of options. Powering it off wasn’t one of them.

  “There at the bottom,” Baxter continued. “Tap where it says safety interlocks.”

  A touch brought up the option to enable the safety interlocks. “What will that make it do?”

  “If I’m right it’ll cause the fusion plant to shut down.”

  Jared considered that. “And if you’re wrong?”

  “If that’s a clever way of asking if it’ll explode, I think not. At worst, it should leave things in the same configuration. It shouldn’t make it go critical.”

  Jared expected Graves to chime in there, but he didn’t, so he mastered his apprehension and tapped the button. The icon for the fusion plant turned red.

  “It went red!”

  “Relax. If it were going to explode, you’d never have noticed the color change. The plant shut down exactly like it was designed to do.”

  Jared let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. The danger was past.

  “Good work,” he said. “Now, make sure there are no other surprises in engineering that might cause us problems. Mertz out.”

  He had to experiment before he figured out how to expand the status back out. Then he went hunting for a reason for the bridge crew to be dead. It took ten minutes, but he finally found the answer in an input log for the console.

  Someone had vented the atmosphere to space from this console. He double-checked to be sure, but it appeared Courageous’ Captain had killed his own people. What Jared couldn’t understand was why.

  Reese signaled him. “Captain, you need to come down to the deck we entered the lift and come forward half a dozen hatches.”

  “What do you have? Patch it through to me.”

  “Sir, I really think you need to come see this in person.”

  If his marine commander said he needed to come in person, Jared was smart enough to trust him. He and his companion made their way carefully back down and Jared saw several men standing outside one hatch looking in. He made his way up to them and looked inside himself.

  It was a mess hall. It held hundreds of dead bodies. Centrifugal motion had piled them in the corner, but he couldn’t mistake this for what it was—a graveyard.

  He felt the gorge rising in his throat, but managed to master the urge to throw up. The crew of Courageous hadn’t escaped after all. This ship was a tomb.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Kelsey stood in the docking bay on Best Deal wearing her very best dress. The heels she wore were killing her feet, but sitting wasn’t an option. She felt drained. Thankfully, it was almost over. The last three days had been hell.

  A Fleet crewmember blew a piercing blast on his whistle, the tune all too familiar to her at this point. Jared and the other Fleet officers, dressed in their resplendent black and red dress uniforms, came to attention as the hatch slid open.

  The marine honor guard brought their weapons in front of them as their comrades brought the last of the crew from Courageous aboard. The men held the sealed boxes high, slow stepping as if the very gravity of the situation held them tightly to the deck.

  Seeing so many dead, both the horrible images from the dead Fleet vessel and the coffins passing her one at a time, felt unreal. Nothing she’d ever done before prepared her for the impact of Fleet welcoming home their dead.

  Jared held his salute until the last of the coffins had passed. A number of storage compartments would hold the dead until they returned to Avalon. Fleet never buried anyone in space. Fleet didn’t abandon their own.

  She put her hand on Jared’s shoulder. “Come on. We both need a meal and a stiff drink. I hear the brains have a really nice bar.”

  He raised an eyebrow tiredly. “They have a bar? How did I miss hearing about it? Better yet, how come you know about it?”

  “The marines. They know every bar within a light year.”

  “Of course they do. Sure.”

  It didn’t take them long to find the place. Someone had outfitted one of the smaller cargo compartments with tables and chairs. The smell of food coming from somewhere made her hungry. A number of crates made up the bar itself. She waved down the server, who looked more like a physicist than anything else.

  “Can we get beer and something from the mess?” she asked. “Sandwiches would be fine.”

  “Of course, Ambassador, Captain. I think we can do significantly better than that. I’ve been watching the ceremony on the vid feed and you deserve it. Do you have any preferences?”

  Jared shook his head. “Anything would be fine. Thank you…”

  “Doctor Brad Parker, Imperial Institute of Science. I’m the planetary sciences team leader.”

  She’d been so close. Not. “I’ll take whatever you get for him,
Doctor. Thank you.”

  “My pleasure. Be right back with some beer.” He headed off through the crowd toward the bar.

  Kelsey turned her attention back to Jared, while surreptitiously kicking off her shoes. “Not to be morbid, but are you sure you’ve found everyone?”

  He nodded. “Search teams covered every part of that ship three times. All five hundred and eighty five of them are now safely back in the hands of their brothers and sisters. Their time alone is over. Fleet and marine personnel will stand guard outside their temporary tomb until we can see them properly interred. Then the permanent honor guard will keep watch over them.”

  “Why does that tradition exist? I’m not putting it down, but I don’t understand the thought behind it.”

  “The single surviving Fleet officer that made it to Avalon’s surface asked for it from the people that found him. He said it was tradition. He inducted his rescuers before he died and they kept watch over him.

  “We’ve followed that tradition ever since. The Imperial Cemetery at the Spire serves for the interment of all the Fleet dead from day one. Even when we didn’t have ships.”

  She started to say something, but the scientist brought them their beer, so she waited for him to leave before continuing. “That doesn’t need any explanation. Honor speaks for itself.”

  He raised his glass in salute. “As an institution, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. They’re watching over us and we don’t dare fail them.”

  “Father has said similar things. I’ve always thought that was incredibly romantic.”

  “Thank you for being there with me. With us. We all appreciate the honor you’ve shown our sacred dead. It will not be forgotten.”

  As tired as she was, Kelsey sat up straighter. “Today, I wasn’t Ambassador Kelsey Bandar. I was Princess Kelsey of the House of Bandar, daughter of your Emperor and Liege. Though He is many light years away, He stood among you today with the Terran Empire behind him. Remember that.”

  Jared bowed his head. “We are grateful.”

  She sighed and surreptitiously rubbed her aching feet. “I’ve been watching things on Courageous over the vid. What kind of shape is she really in?”

  “Not bad at all, considering her age and the battle damage. She’s structurally sound, even though she doesn’t have power. Baxter even said he might be able to repair her, if he had the time and knowhow. Now that we’ve used the pinnaces to stop her tumble, we can get people on and off her without any difficulty.

  “Baxter is working on some kind of standby power that can be strung in through the hole in her engineering compartment to power the main grid. That should allow us to see how much of the computer and ship’s systems are fit enough to power up. He promised to have something ready by tomorrow.”

  She took a sip of her beer. “I’m impressed that you stopped that tumble. I never thought that would even be possible.”

  “It doesn’t matter that the pinnaces are small. Every bit of thrust from their grav drives worked to slow her bit by bit. One could even stop the spin at Orbital One with enough time. To every action there is a reaction.”

  “What do we do now? Both with the ship and getting home?”

  Doctor Parker chose that moment to return with two salads and a platter of sizzling meat mixed with vegetables. The scent made her mouth water.

  “Here you are,” the scientist said. “On the house. Of course, everything here is always on the house, but you get the idea.”

  She smiled at him. “Thank you, Doctor Parker.”

  Jared added his thanks and waited for the man to leave before continuing. “We’re stocked for a five year mission, though the last two of that is preserved rations. A freighter has a lot of space, even after the conversion to a science ship, so we don’t need to worry about running out of supplies just yet. I expect we’ll find plenty of habitable worlds as we try to find our way home.”

  “How will we do that? We can’t even guess where a flip point will take us. Without being able to follow the path we used to get here, I’m at a loss how we get back.” She tried to keep from sounding depressed at the idea of not going home, but she knew it colored her tone.

  Jared smiled. “You have to have faith. We’ll get there eventually. Courageous came from the same Empire we did. No matter how daunting the journey, we can make it home.”

  “How do we know it didn’t come here through that damned flip point? It might have been trapped here.”

  “Then where is the ship that crippled her?”

  “Destroyed. Drifting in space. Fell into the star.”

  “Aren’t you a pessimist?” he asked, taking a bite of his salad. “While our probes haven’t searched every kilometer of this system, I’m confident that we’ll find that the enemy had fled the field. Probably through the flip point we detected partway around the ecliptic.”

  Kelsey froze with her fork partway to her mouth. “You found another flip point? Why haven’t I heard this before?”

  “Eat before you chew on me. The salad is much tastier than my dress uniform.” He infuriatingly waited for her to take a bite. She had to admit it was good. She was famished.

  He continued as she started putting the food away. “One of the men came up and whispered it to me just before that last pinnace docked. It’s a full-sized, absolutely normal flip point.”

  “That’s wonderful news! I’ll drink to that!” She lifted her beer and took a healthy drink.

  “I’ve been thinking about what we can do and I’ve come up with several things. First, we’ll finish exploring Courageous. We can recover a lot of Courageous’ equipment and store it in Best Deal’s holds. Then we prep a probe with everything we have data wise and send it back to the system on the other side of the flip point. A search party will eventually come this way and then they’ll know about the weak flip point.”

  “Could we get one to go back and contact the Empire?”

  “That’s a lot less likely. Baxter is going to tear one of the probes apart and try to build enough redundancy into it to make that happen. If it works we’re still looking at a couple of months to get a ship out here.”

  He tried some of the meat. “This is good. Even though they can’t come after us, they can send supplies through if we can’t get out of this sector. Living in ships would suck, but we can do it. I still don’t believe we’ll need to. I suspect we’re closer to Terra than we ever were before.”

  Kelsey raised an eyebrow. “Why would you think that?”

  “A hunch. Someone chased Courageous here and killed her. Hopefully we’ll find out more as we explore the ship, but I’m willing to bet the rebels did it.”

  “The rebels chased Emperor Lucien to Avalon,” she pointed out.

  “Yes, but none of them came back. They had more pressing business elsewhere. Since they were here chasing a Fleet unit, I’ll bet that means we’re deeper into the old Empire. Admittedly, I could be wrong, but I prefer to be optimistic.”

  They ate silently for a while. The food was better than good, Kelsey decided. Not that she could eat everything. She let Jared finish her food before she ordered a second beer.

  “Nothing I’ve ever read said why the rebels did what they did,” she said at last. “Who were they and why were they so vicious? They’d used a kinetic strike on a city that couldn’t shoot back. That attack killed over a million people. Now Courageous. They were crippled and left to die. That’s not just a minor difference of opinion.”

  “Perhaps they weren’t left to die. Perhaps they ran out of options. Courageous is a long way from the flip point in a slow orbit. A ship at rest isn’t detectable at that kind of range. This system has two very large asteroid belts in addition to half dozen uninhabitable planets. It would take a large number of ships to find her if she didn’t want to be found.”

  He took another gulp of his beer. “Dennis also found evidence of repairs. They had days or weeks to try to fix the damage done to their ship after the fight. What they did
n’t have was air.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Athena recycles her air, but there is a limited supply. We have three different tankage areas. Courageous had six. The fighting breached five of those. The last is empty.”

  “Did the rebels intentionally do that to her?” Kelsey shuddered. “I’m glad the rebels are dead.”

  “I hope they are. One of Fleet’s biggest fears is that we’ll encounter their descendants. We don’t have anything like what the old Empire had in warships. We’d go down fighting, but we’d go down. That’s why we can wipe the critical computer systems on Athena and Best Deal. Just in case.”

  “That’s morbid. Let’s change the subject. Now that Courageous is safer, when can I go see her for myself?”

  He looked like his preferred answer would be ‘never’ but he didn’t say that. “If we can restore environmental controls I’ll let you go. Until there’s an atmosphere, you’ll need to do your visiting via vid. The scientists, too.”

  That wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but she knew better than to argue. “Thank you.”

  “In the meantime, I know there are a lot of things coming over for the scientists to examine. I’m sure they would love to have your help with some of the personal belongings.”

  Somehow, she doubted they’d want her looking over their shoulders. Not that she’d let that stop her.

  Examining the personal belongings of the dead was even more morbid, but she knew he was right to collect everything. Any bit might provide a clue to something important. A dead man’s data reader might have tech manuals on something critical. A dead woman’s knick-knacks might have incredible cultural significance. And vice versa. Nothing was too ordinary or too small for them to collect.

  “I’ll stay clear of the ship,” she said, “but I want you to make me a trade.”

  “Name it.”

  “I don’t like being blocked by a lack of skills. Can someone train me on going into vacuum in case this comes up again? Like one of the marines?”

  He considered that for a moment and then nodded. “Deal.”

  They finished their last beer in silence. She wondered what they would find when they finished examining Courageous. Secrets she couldn’t even imagine? Or just more questions?