Hidden Enemies (Book 9 of The Empire of Bones Saga)

by Terry Mixon

  He gestured toward the hatch. “Consider this your interview to join the New Terran Empire. Take charge and let’s see how this goes.”

  Veronica took a deep breath and quelled the butterflies in her stomach. This was the first concrete step down a path she could never turn away from. When Commander Renner got around to calling her a traitor, it would be completely true.

  “Perhaps you could give me a clue as to what you’re hoping to gain from this woman. She’s a security officer, so she’s never going to cooperate with us. From what I understand, you already have complete access to the research taking place at the Dresden orbital. Is that right?”

  He nodded. “We don’t need her for the specific information that Commander Castille could have provided. I’d rather know more about the Rebel Empire and how the System Lords operate. Yes, I know you grew up there and that you have knowledge about them. We need to know even more than that going forward.

  “If we’re going to take the fight to them, we need to have some kind of idea of what they really want. They crushed the Terran Empire from the inside and enslaved every human in sight. Simply based on the fact that we now have someone from the Singularity on the loose, we know that the AIs stopped at the border.

  “If they wanted to expand out to cover the entirety of known space and all the polities of humanity, they could’ve done so. There’s no doubt whatsoever in my mind that they stopped on purpose.

  “Why is that? Does the AI at Twilight River have some kind of restriction that prevents it from operating outside the bounds of the Old Terran Empire? What does the Rebel Empire’s security apparatus know? The insight that woman can provide into how the AIs operate would be invaluable.”

  Veronica snorted. “I stand by my earlier statement. She’s never going to cooperate with us. Nothing you can do to her can force her to tell you anything and no amount of cajoling is going to bring her over to our side, even if she tries to make you think that’s possible.”

  “Maybe you’re more persuasive than you know,” he said with a smile. “Even given that the odds are against us, it only costs us time. She’s not going anywhere. She can either sit in that compartment alone or engage with us. Any amount of contact is going to give us the opportunity to pick up something.”

  “Or allow her to lie her ass off,” Veronica said in a cynical tone. “Well, I suppose it can’t hurt to try. If nothing else, it’s better than sitting in my little compartment, too. Your ship’s library is big, but talking to people is much more to my taste.”

  “I’ll let you two handle this,” Major Ellis said. “I’ve got to get back over to Persephone. Have fun.”

  Veronica stepped over to the hatch after the other woman had departed. “Shall we?”

  7

  To her annoyance, Zia wasn’t able to talk her way out of being expelled from the wrecked battlecruiser. The warriors herded her, Carl, and their Pandoran escort politely but firmly out into the sunlight and stood watching them to make certain they kept moving.

  “Well, that could’ve gone better,” Carl muttered. “We only just got in and now we’re banned for life.”

  She poked the scientist in the shoulder. “Don’t start that nonsense with me! You know as well as I do that a defective fusion plant is nothing to screw around with. If you’d left it operating below the minimum threshold, sooner or later it would have failed, probably with a significant explosion.”

  “It’s still going to fail if they keep using it without shutting it down for maintenance. It’s a miracle the damn thing kept working all this time anyway. I did what I could while I was linked with it and adjusted the safety parameters to make certain that if it starts acting the least bit unstable, it will go into a graceful shutdown.

  “In other words, I implemented the most stringent safety protocols. The time to be generous with its operation protocols has long passed. A rogue fusion plant is nothing to toy with.”

  Zia glanced at Efrain. The Pandoran warrior shrugged, apparently unconcerned with the revelation.

  “By any chance did you get a look at the flip drive while you were in the system?” she asked.

  “No,” Carl said with a shake of his head. “It was disconnected from the ship’s systems or was completely burned out and inaccessible. To be absolutely certain what condition it’s in, I’d need to access it directly and I’ll wager that’s not going to be easy now.”

  No, probably not.

  “I hope Kelsey made a good impression on the king,” she said. “If he says we get access, that overseer is going to have to let us back in. Meanwhile, we need to look at other avenues to getting our ship repaired.

  “The freighter is almost three quarters the size of Audacious. Is it possible to use its flip drive on the carrier?”

  From Carl’s expression, she knew he didn’t hold out much hope on that front.

  “I’m going to give that a qualified ‘no’ and beg you not to try. Trust me when I say that very bad things could happen.”

  She sighed. That was about the answer she expected.

  “So, if the freighter isn’t an option and the drive on this battlecruiser is defective, what do we do? Hell, even if it was fully functional, the drive on Dauntless wouldn’t be able to move a carrier, would it?”

  Carl shook his head. “Probably not. This was always a longshot, but not one I thought would bear fruit. There are other options, but I wouldn’t call them good options. We can get to a system that almost certainly has the parts we need. It’s just not very friendly, if you know what I mean.”

  She did indeed know what he meant: the Archibald system.

  They’d explored the multiflip point enough to find five destinations from the Icebox system. One of the potential destinations was the Archibald system. It had been a major world in the Old Empire and was still bustling under the management of the AIs. There was almost certainly a shipyard there where they could theoretically get parts.

  The other destinations from Icebox were Pandora and three uninhabited systems. One of the latter was in the Rebel Empire and not far from Dresden.

  Those destinations weren’t very useful at the moment as there were a number of hostile Clan warships sitting right at the flip point. Any strange ship would be promptly attacked and likely destroyed.

  From the Pandora side, they could access four systems. One, thankfully, was Archibald. The other three included Icebox and two different uninhabited systems.

  “Somehow I don’t expect the Rebel Empire is going to be very cooperative,” Zia said dryly.

  “Probably not,” Carl agreed. “That doesn’t change the fact that that’s the most likely location to get what we need.”

  Zia hadn’t discussed this with Princess Kelsey yet, but she’d already decided getting everyone home wasn’t actually what constituted mission success in this case. Everything of serious value that they’d captured on the Dresden orbital could fit aboard Persephone and the freighter.

  If push came to shove, the Marine Raider strike ship could go through the multiflip point to one of the empty systems and search for linkages to new systems that might give them a path clear of danger and get them home.

  Hell, one of these other systems might have one of those new flip points they’d discovered. Ones that sat far distant from the solar masses they were linked to. That’s where the Clans had gone when they’d escaped Icebox. Through an unknown kind of flip point sitting in the outer system.

  That course of action was chancy at best, but it beat being trapped here with the crippled carrier. Eventually, the Clans would find a way to use the multiflip point and find them. That wasn’t going to be fun.

  She suspected the heir to the Imperial throne had already thought of that. The woman was bright and she wouldn’t have missed that option. Not that she’d be easily convinced. It was going to take either a disaster or all other options failing before Princess Kelsey abandoned the carrier and its crew.

  And that’s what it came down to. There was no room to f
it everyone from Audacious aboard the freighter and have enough life support to get them very far. No matter how the situation was juggled, someone was going to have to stay behind if the forces from the New Terran Empire left Pandora without repairing the carrier.

  So, that meant Zia needed to explore every potential option if she was going to get Princess Kelsey safely home.

  “Let’s get back to Audacious,” she said at last. “We’re not going to solve our problems standing around down here. Maybe Colonel Talbot has dug up a few new leads for us to examine.”

  Carl grinned at her. “Oh, I think you could reasonably say that he has. I just got a message from him when I linked up to the cutter via the drone keeping an eye on us. I’ll wager you’ve got one waiting for you, too.”

  Zia checked her implants and found a message waiting for her. It was from Colonel Talbot and was marked urgent. She opened it and started the video playing.

  A ghostly image of Talbot’s head and torso appeared in front of her in the form of a translucent overlay hovering over the ground ahead of her. He was grinning.

  “Commodore, the people I had searching the freighter just hit pay dirt. They found the hardware for a new AI. I had it moved to Persephone. I’ll wager all that additional computing power and a sentient AI will help Carl figure out a way to get us home.”

  Well, that certainly did change things a little. Having met Marcus and Harrison, the two AIs the New Terran Empire had working with them, Zia felt confident that the presence of a sentient AI would be a real boon to them, under the right circumstances.

  “Let’s get going,” she said with a grin. “We might just have gotten the break we needed.”

  Talbot followed Veronica Giguere into the compartment holding their prisoner. The woman didn’t look all that dangerous, but appearances could be very deceptive. Having met Raul Castille, Talbot knew how resourceful security officers in the Rebel Empire could be.

  The woman had sat down on the edge of the couch. She didn’t rise as they entered.

  As in the case of the Singularity prisoner, two marines were inside the compartment with her. Neither was armed and they had compatriots in the corridor that could rush in with stunners if need be.

  “So,” the woman said in a slow drawl. “You’ve decided it’s time to come and ask me a few questions. I’d wondered why it was taking so long?”

  “Each thing in its time,” Veronica said coolly. “As your hosts, I’m afraid we’re going to have to assert a monopoly on asking questions. Perhaps if you’re cooperative that situation may change.”

  Commander Renner smiled just a little bit. “You, I know. Commander Veronica Giguere, commanding officer of the destroyer R-7322. Somehow I don’t think that small a ship has such expansive accommodations and I don’t believe that I’m still aboard the Dresden orbital. That raises some interesting possibilities.”

  The woman shifted her gaze to Talbot. “You, I don’t know. Based on your uniform, you’re a senior marine officer. Would you care to introduce yourself? I figure I have perhaps a sixty percent chance of you providing your name. The lieutenants you have guarding me have proven uncooperative, though, so I might be wrong.”

  In fact, the men guarding her were noncommissioned marines. They wore the uniforms of officers to explain away the fact that they had implants. Inside the Rebel Empire, only officers had implants.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Russell Talbot,” he said easily. “I’m directly in charge of maintaining your… accommodations.”

  “I’m afraid that you’re not going to get a very positive review from me,” Renner said oppressively. “Guest services could use a lot of work.”

  The woman proceeded to ignore Talbot and focused her attention back on Commander Giguere. “Since I know you left with the fleet sent to eliminate that crazy computer, that leads me to wonder why you’ve come back and how you’re connected to the people that attacked the Dresden orbital.

  “I can’t imagine you seized anything worthwhile. Raul Castile has a well-deserved reputation. So what is this all about?”

  “Which part of ‘we’ll ask the questions’ did you fail to understand?” Commander Giguere asked rhetorically. “As an Imperial security officer, you probably know the System Lords far better than anyone else. How do you think they’re going to react to this attack on one of their classified research and manufacturing facilities?”

  Renner laughed. “They’ll hunt you down and exterminate you with what they call extreme prejudice. Though the odds of you learning much about the classified research is low, they cannot allow even the possibility of it being under the control of unauthorized human beings.

  “Whatever system is responsible for financing you will be suppressed. Every ship that participated in this atrocity, and every person on board those ships, will be destroyed.”

  “That’s an interesting word to choose,” Talbot said. “The computer intelligences you work for exterminated trillions of human beings. That’s the very definition of atrocity.”

  “You’re a fool,” Renner said. “You’re also rebels and traitors. It’s a tragedy that so many people died in throwing off the yoke of the old dictatorship, but one does not make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

  “I once thought the same as you,” Giguere said. “Then I had my eyes opened. I saw proof that our history was a lie. I suspect you already know that. Commander Castile did. He said so before I killed him.”

  Talbot was impressed. Veronica Giguere was going hard-core. There wasn’t any stepping back from that kind of admission.

  Finally, Renner reacted. Her eyes narrowed as she stared at Giguere. “Did you, now? I’m going to take exceptional pleasure in killing you back.”

  With that, the woman launched herself off the couch and at Commander Giguere, her bladed hand slashing at the injured woman’s throat.

  Talbot moved to block the security officer, but he was slow. He knew he wouldn’t be fast enough to stop that unexpected attack and that might just mean watching Veronica Giguere strangle to death with a crushed larynx before medical help arrived.

  8

  Kelsey felt her eyes narrowing. Having seen Isidro’s personality, she should’ve expected the ambush. Well, at least Talbot had taught her what one did during an ambush: they didn’t run, they fought their way out.

  She stalked forward until she stood just in front of the battered wooden table, planted her hands on her hips, and glared back at the man who had demanded her surrender.

  “My name is Kelsey Bandar and this tribunal has no authority over me. The sooner you accept that, the sooner we can both move forward.”

  “Preposterous,” Isidro sneered from his position to the side. “Clan Dauntless has authority over all humans on this world. You don’t get to just declare your independence.”

  From what she’d heard, that wasn’t completely true. There were some few humans living inside the Empire of Kalor and Kelsey doubted they acknowledged the authority of Clan Dauntless. Not that she intended to mention that since it might imply she was one of them.

  From the glance the man at the center shot the warrior, Isidro was speaking out of turn. The warrior didn’t see it since he was too busy staring daggers at Kelsey.

  With a sigh, the man at the center of the table returned his attention to Kelsey. “Young Isidro is correct. You are of Clan Dauntless and you will submit to this tribunal’s will. Explain yourself.”

  Kelsey laughed. “As I explained to Arturo, your first mistake is assuming that I’m of this world. I’m not. I only just arrived a few days ago and I come from beyond. I am Kelsey Bandar, chief of Clan Persephone.”

  Now it was the man’s turn to stare at her agog. He shifted his gaze to Jacob and Arturo. “What madness is this? There is no Clan Persephone, even in the world we came from. The histories have no mention of anything like that.”

  Jacob offered the man a slight smile. “I have personally stood on the decks of her ship as it orbits our world. Her people were never part of
the Clans. They are also not part of the empire from which we fled. Let’s just say their story is more complicated than we can get into right now.

  “I was bringing her to meet the king of Raden. She needs to explain her situation to him. He will make the final decision on whether she speaks the truth or not, though I already know how he will decide. My blood brother, Derek, has also seen her ship. Even as we speak, he is no doubt briefing his father.”

  “Speaking of fathers, yours won’t be pleased to be left out,” the man warned Jacob.

  “He rarely is,” Jacob replied curtly. “Once the king is satisfied, we can journey to my father and tell him her story.”

  Isidro took two steps forward and snarled. “Lies! I don’t know what kind of game you are playing at but you will not get away with lying to us.”

  “Isidro!” the man at the center of the table barked. “You overstep yourself. I lead here and you will follow.”

  “If you were leading, you’d already have these two in chains for defying the Clan. This woman attacked me. She violates the laws of Clan Dauntless, bearing weapons and acting outside the prescribed behavior for women. For this, she must pay.”

  Kelsey laughed at him. “If Clan Dauntless wants to enforce its will upon me, it’s welcome to try. In my world, women have exactly the same rights and responsibilities as men. No one can tell them that they must behave in some fashion or other and I won’t tolerate that kind of sexism.”

  Jacob cleared his throat. “Isidro overstates our ways. The Clans have never had a large female population. Elsewhere, the Clans forbid them from dangerous occupations and curtail their rights.

  Not here. We don’t repress our women. We cherish them. Custom dictates they are not warriors on this world, but there have been exceptions to that rule. Trust me when I say that they are the very soul of Clan Dauntless and they wield as much political power as any man, though often from behind the scenes.”