by Terry Mixon
The three of them considered one another and downed their drinks.
6
Kelsey still couldn’t get her mind around what these people were telling her. Of course she’d known that some aspects of alternate realities would be different. Just not this different.
After speaking with Elise for more than an hour, she asked for a place she could think. Alone. They’d speedily provided her with a cabin and some quiet, if not peace.
She wanted to reject everything her friend had told her out of hand, but that would’ve been stupid. No, but she couldn’t just accept it at face value either.
The biggest sticking point for her was, of course, the Bastard. He couldn’t be the hero here. He’d killed her father and tried to kill her brother. Hell, he’d tried to kill her before he’d deserted with his followers. Even now he was off somewhere plotting to seize the Throne from Ethan.
So that begged the question, how could he have fooled everyone here so thoroughly? Elise was no idiot. For that matter, neither was Sean.
She’s always trusted the man’s judgement and he’d never ever been one of the toadies that coddled up to the Bastard. How could he be in the man’s camp now?
Yet this was the reality she had to deal with. One where the Bastard had them all under his spell. One where she had to get the assistance that her people needed to survive over his inevitable sabotage and backstabbing.
On the plus side, her father was still alive here. She could warn him what a viper he’d taken to his breast before it was too late.
The thought of seeing him again made her cry. A weakness she couldn’t afford to let anyone see. Not here. Not ever.
Her father’s assassination had started the civil war no one had seen coming in the New Terran Empire. One it could ill afford. Sadly, it had also thrust her brother onto the Throne before he’d been prepared to shoulder the burden.
Mistakes had been made. That was inevitable when fighting two powerful enemies at the same time. But that boat had sailed. There was no going back to do things over.
Not in her home.
A rap at the hatch made her hastily wipe her face. “Give me a moment.”
She rushed into the bathroom and washed her face. Once she was satisfied she looked as normal as possible, she opened the hatch. Sean Meyer stood outside.
He smiled at her. “We’re in orbit around Avalon. The admiral has asked that I escort you to the Imperial Palace. He felt this wasn’t the time for the two of you to work out your differences.”
“As if the two of us will ever ‘work out our differences’ except on a battlefield where I leave his smoldering corpse behind.”
The vehemence she felt didn’t surprise her, but it was more than she’d wanted to show. She had to at least pretend to get along with the Bastard until she got what she needed.
“I can see how that might seem to be a difficult task,” Sean said with admirable aplomb. “I’m grateful we don’t seem to have such baggage.”
Kelsey sighed. “You’ve always been a good friend and wise advisor to me. I have to confess that I don’t understand how things here are so wrong. My father is truly alive?”
He nodded. “And in excellent health. God willing, the Empire will have him at the helm for many long centuries.”
She frowned. “Centuries?”
He raised an eyebrow. “We still have a lot to learn about one another. I can’t see how you don’t know why that is, but I can discuss it with you on the way down. I’m afraid I must insist that you leave your armor behind.”
Kelsey had expected that. “I want your word that it will be returned to me once I have finished meeting with my father. It’s irreplaceable.”
“Done,” he said at once. “And the same is true of your weapons. I realize that you’re technically a weapon, too, but I have to trust that you don’t intend your father any harm.”
“Absolutely not,” she said with a firm shake of her head. “I would die to protect him. I couldn’t the first time, but I won’t allow him to be hurt again. Ever.”
He nodded. “I’ve taken the liberty of getting a uniform for you.” He gestured for a rating to bring it to him and then handed the folded garment to her. “You can leave your armor in marine country. It’ll be safe there.”
Kelsey seriously doubted the uniform would fit. She was far smaller than most women. Still, it would do until she could get something in her size.
She allowed him escort her to marine country. It was set up exactly like the one on Ginnie Dare. How she wished Angela were here with her now.
The strange sense of déjà vu lasted until she stepped into the changing room and what she saw stopped her dead in her tracks. The bulkheads held rack after rack of powered armor. Dozens of suits.
“Is something wrong?” Sean asked, a slight frown on his face.
“Where did you get these?” she asked reverently. “Do they work?”
“They wouldn’t be of much use if they didn’t,” he said dryly. “You act as if you’d never seen anything like them.”
She ran a hand along the arm of one of the massive suits. “Only in video images.”
Thank God there had been none aboard Courageous when the Bastard had stolen her. That would’ve been the end of the New Terran Empire.
After staring at the armor for a long moment, she turned to face Sean. “Where did you find them?”
“The graveyard around Boxer Station. Didn’t you say you’d been there?”
She felt herself frowning. “Graveyard? I don’t understand.”
He gave her an odd look. “The mass of wrecks left over from the Fall. The AIs brought everything that survived there and put them in wide orbits around Boxer Station. We think there are around fifty thousand derelicts.”
“Fifty thousand—” She snapped her mouth closed as her eyes widened. “There were no ships there. Hell, there was barely a station even before we blew it up. Are you joking?”
He shook his head. “It’s where this destroyer came from. The same for most of the new ships in Fleet. All this armor was recovered there and refurbished.”
Her throat squeezed shut as if someone were choking her. She literally felt faint.
“Nothing like that exists in my universe,” she said softly. “This is an Old Empire ship? Like Courageous?”
“It is,” he said with a nod. “We have the newly repaired light cruiser Brazil with us and that isn’t the only ship in orbit around Avalon, though most of Fleet is at Erorsi.”
The absurdity of the situation made her laugh bitterly. “I doubt you’d be interested in my old, beat up armor, then. Look at these things. Oh, what we could do with something like this.”
She was grateful the Bastard hadn’t found a place to rearm the stolen Old Empire battlecruiser. With enough missiles, he’d have conquered the New Terran Empire by now.
“I suppose I’d best get changed,” she said with the shake of her head. “I can’t wait to see what other revelations you have for me.”
“I can see we need to make a pass by Gibraltar before we head down. I’ll let you change in peace.”
He stepped out of the chamber and left her with several marines. Not all of them female.
She cleared her throat. “If you gentlemen would excuse us, I need to get out of this.”
They shared what certainly looked like confused glances and the men departed. The two women who remained would be barely enough to help her get the armor off, but she’d manage.
“Do you want to use the rack over here, Highness?” one of them asked.
“I’ve never had a rack. How does it work?”
They got her into the contraption and it made getting out of her armor a damned breeze. She’d have to get her people busy making something like this.
The women’s eyes widened when they saw her body and both stepped back. Kelsey was sadly used to that kind of reaction, which was one of the reasons no one ever saw her naked.
Puckered scars crisscrossed her entire
body, a never-ending reminder of when the Pale Ones had stolen her innocence.
She was eternally grateful the doctors on Spear had managed to get her face, skull, and hands regenerated. She missed her left eye, but the artificial one worked well enough, even if it was hideous.
The other blessing was that the scientists had restrained her wild rage until they’d scrubbed the corrupt code from her implants. The mere thought of being a slave to the AI’s programming again made her quail.
She’d kill herself if they ever seemed likely. The damned things were still a threat, but one that she hoped they beat before too much longer.
Ignoring the stares, Kelsey stripped off her underwear and dressed. She was astonished to discover that the bare uniform fit as if it had been made for her. As short as she was, that never happened.
Once she was dressed, she had the marines bring Sean back in. “I’m ready to see my father.”
To say Jared’s father was surprised to see him again was an understatement. They met in the same private room they’d dined in last night
The older man raised an eyebrow. “Did you forget something?”
“You might want to pour a drink and sit down before I tell you.”
That sent the other eyebrow up to join its companion. “This doesn’t sound promising.”
The emperor sat—minus drink—and gestured for Jared to join him. “What’s wrong?”
“Not so much wrong,” Jared said as he sat. “More like sideways. Something that isn’t inherently good or bad, but wasn’t planned for. We have a visitor from another reality via Omega. It’s Kelsey.”
Karl Bandar considered Jared for a long moment without saying a word. When he did speak, his voice was soft. “I knew that was a possibility but that hardly prepares one. Is she like our own Kelsey?”
Jared gave him a long stare and then shook her head. “I don’t have time to get into the specifics because she can’t be more than an hour behind me, but events didn’t progress in her universe the same way they did here. Let’s just say that her opinion of me tilts more toward how Ethan felt.”
His father grimaced. “Oh Jared. I’m so sorry. I know how close you’ve become and that has to hurt.”
“More than you can imagine, but that’s hardly the only difference. Things have not gone nearly as well in her universe as here. I can’t speak to the specifics, but Elise was able to figure out a number of differences.
“We’ll have to work out a timeline at some point, but I’m guessing they haven’t actually met the Rebel Empire in direct combat just yet. They didn’t get the ships at Boxer Station. The AI there sterilized Harrison’s World and there were no derelicts. No AI, either. Just rudimentary defenses.
“Honestly, I don’t think Courageous was in as good a condition, either. Kelsey was hurt at some point and has an artificial eye. Their regeneration tech must be deficient and her nanites need looking at.
“In any case, they don’t have the battlecruiser now. Evil me stole it. Sometime around when I killed you and tried to kill Ethan, if the story is to be believed. Ethan is the current emperor there, by the way. I’m the one trying to steal the Throne.”
“Amazing,” his father said sadly after a long moment. “That’s what Ethan said here, too, yet we both know he was unbalanced.”
“I have no idea,” Jared said with a shrug. “This Kelsey might not even know. In the end, it hardly matters. She believes what she believes, and she’s come to ask us to do something. She knows about the key and the override.”
“That is awkward,” the emperor admitted. “We need them for ourselves. Yet, if I could help her, I would. In some sense, her people are my people, too.”
The older man considered things for a long moment. “The very least I can do is hear her out. She’s my daughter. If I can find a path that saves our people and helps hers too, I’ll do it.”
Jared nodded, but inside he worried that they just didn’t know enough about the enigmatic Kelsey to make a decision like that. Was she telling them the truth or did she have ulterior plans of her own?
There was only one way to discover the truth. They had to let things play out. In the meanwhile, he’d take what precautions he could.
“Before you meet with her, we need to think about security,” Jared said. “She’s got Kelsey’s implants and all our computers will recognize her as the heir to the Imperial Throne. We have to come up with a way to restrict her authority.”
The emperor nodded. “An excellent point. Luckily, we have a solution to that. I’ll speak with the Imperial physician and have him declare her medically unfit. I’ll have to tell the Senate and get their backing, but Breckenridge will understand. This isn’t about my daughter here—and she isn’t even in the same region of space—so I think the two of us can work something out.”
“Send Elise to talk with him,” Jared urged him. “She and Breckenridge have managed to develop a good working relationship. And, she was waiting for me in the Nova system when the new Kelsey showed up on Omega. She’s up in orbit now.”
The emperor nodded decisively. “Talk to her while I deal with your sister. Your sort of sister? You and she have my full backing in bringing the senator around.
“And start planning for a more ambitious mission into the Rebel Empire. I think you might be taking a much longer trip than we’d first intended.”
7
Olivia was waiting for Sean and Kelsey when they arrived at the docking level. She silently approved of seeing the smaller woman in something other than her armor. She wondered briefly why her armor was black rather than gray, but decided that really didn’t matter.
She stepped forward as they approached. “I’ve decided to join you, unless anyone objects. I’ve never seen Avalon in person and would like to.”
“Of course,” her lover wisely agreed. “If the two of you will board the cutter, we’ll get started.”
Sean sat on the other side of Kelsey from Olivia. “Once we undock, I’ve instructed the pilot to make a pass by Orbital One on the way down. I think you’ll want to tap into the cutter’s scanner feed.”
The cutter bumped a little as it came loose from the destroyer and began moving under its own power. Olivia had tapped into scanners before, but it was still a new and interesting process for her.
Even though she’d been born to a social class that implanted their children at a fairly young age and she’d been so equipped for her entire adult life, she’d never had the opportunity to use a ship’s scanners before the New Terran Empire came to visit.
The higher orders had the odd habit of working around their implants rather than with them. She’d begun wondering if that was an intentional change in the social structure made by the AIs. They needed the implants to control the leadership of the Rebel Empire, but didn’t want them actually becoming a threat.
She turned her attention to Kelsey. “You said that my world was dead in your universe. The AIs destroyed it. Could you tell how long ago?”
The smaller woman shrugged. “Recently. Decades, probably. There wasn’t a whole lot left to put together. I’m sorry.”
Olivia was still in shock about the events on her world in the other universe, but they felt like someone else’s story.
“It’s not your fault. If anything, it’s mine. I was part of the resistance. We planned to rebel against the system Lord. Ah…the AI ruling the system from Boxer Station. I suspect it didn’t work out nearly as well as we’d hoped.”
“That sounds like something of an understatement,” Kelsey agreed. “We found the weak flip point in Erorsi almost by accident and had to retreat through it later. A few flips more and we came across your world, though we didn’t know its name.
“The planet had three stations in orbit with orbital bombardment weapons. Someone had used them to exterminate the population. No area was left untouched and we found no survivors. It was horrible.”
Olivia nodded, feeling a bit faint. “We’d intended to restore a mostly intact ship
from the graveyard in secret and depose the system Lord. In this universe, we never got a chance to try. Something or someone tipped off the AI and it locked us down. I wonder if we managed to try in your universe and that was our reward.”
Kelsey shrugged. “The old Fleet base was mostly intact, but had a lot of battle damage. It looked recent, too. It fought us, but we managed to sneak up on it and a lucky shot set off one of its fusion reactors.
“There were no signs of other ships in the system. We blew up the orbital stations to be sure they couldn’t hurt us. We found the weak flip point leading to that horrible system with the nova and figured out how to use the battle screens to get a ship over.
“Thankfully, that was one of the technologies we managed to keep when—”
Kelsey clamped her lips shut. “Well, let’s just say that it’s hell when you have something like that snatched from your grasp.”
It made Olivia sad to see how much pain this Kelsey had gone through. She’d thought what her friend had endured was bad. This only proved how lucky they’d all been.
“So,” Olivia ventured. “How are you handling the Rebel Empire there?”
“I assume that’s what you mean by what’s left of the Old Empire,” Kelsey said. “We worked with the Pentagarans to ambush the freighter bringing supplies to Erorsi. The destroyer was tough, but Captain Breckenridge used Courageous to turn the tide.”
Kelsey raised her eyes and stared at Olivia. “To answer your question, not well. I was there in Erorsi when an overwhelming number of Old Empire ships—probably under control of something like the Pale Ones—came into the system and attacked everything in sight.
“My ships were out near the weak flip point, so we fled that way. The Pale Ones and those computers don’t know about the weak flip points. Thank God.”
Olivia had a decent idea of the timeline here. Something just didn’t make sense. Well, a lot of things didn’t make sense, but one thing in particular stuck out to her.
“You and the expedition were trapped in Pentagar space,” she ventured. “If Jared Mertz wasn’t with you, how did he steal Courageous? I thought he staged an attempted coup on Avalon. He can’t be in two places at once. Did you find another way home?”
