The Glory of the Empress

by Sean Danker

  “Maybe they’re deploying,” Sergeant Golding suggested. “They’re just private military to Tenbrook, right? Maybe he’s putting them to work. Or maybe they heard what happened to their friends when they ran up against us. Maybe they’re spooked.”

  “That would account for some, but not all.” Mao shook her head. “Pirates aren’t the only people here. What about the rest? There are actual professionals and families here, you know. Not everyone on Oasis is a criminal. Those people aren’t going anywhere; they just became imperial subjects. Most of them probably don’t want to leave.”

  “What if they didn’t? What if they’re just dark for whatever reason?” Woodhouse suggested.

  “It’s possible, but I don’t think so. And it wouldn’t explain why we haven’t seen anyone. Unless Tenbrook somehow got everyone to clear out, which I don’t believe.” Mao pointed out the viewport at the stars. “He doesn’t have that much sway, and why would he do it? My first thought was that he was clearing the way for us. That this was a trap. But if he knew we were here, he’d just come get us.”

  “Does anyone have the tech to fool us into thinking we aren’t hearing anything?” Bjorn asked. “Not the blackout. Something else.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mao replied immediately. “Short-range signals are working fine. It really is quiet out there.”

  “Commander, you’re doing it,” Bjorn said.

  “What is that, Lieutenant Bjorn?”

  “The thing. Your thing. Where you have something to say and you’re just waiting.”

  She put her hands on her hips and stared at him, expressionless. Then she turned away, clearing her throat. “The only plausible explanation that I can think of is that Oasis has been destroyed.”

  “Destroyed,” Major Compton echoed, looking dubious.

  “Yes, destroyed. It’s the only way to account for absolute silence. If anything else was going on, there’d still be something out here. Here’s the question I haven’t been able to answer: how’s it possible? Who destroyed it? Why? How?”

  “Tenbrook’s the only one with the firepower,” Woodhouse said. “You want to completely silence a whole commercial station, you’d need a fleet. Or at least a few Everwings. Tenbrook could do it. We know the Ganraen navy isn’t here. Who does that leave?”

  “Quite a few people, probably.” Mao was pacing again. “But I don’t have any context for what they might be up to, and none of that matters. If Oasis is gone, or even seriously compromised, we’re in trouble. My plan falls apart without it.”

  “How would you want to play it?” Bjorn asked immediately. Mao didn’t hold these briefings just to get her staff’s thoughts; she did it to weigh them against her own. She wouldn’t open the subject up without having her own plan to gauge against the views of her people.

  She gave him another funny look.

  “The reason we’re hobbled this way is because we’ve been too scared to leave Doyle. We’ve assumed that there are too many pirates around for him to be left unprotected. But maybe that isn’t true. If there’s no one here, maybe he really can make his own way.”

  “Without dry dock at Oasis, he can’t get jump capable,” Woodhouse said. “And without jumping, we’ll never make it home. So where else is there to go? Free Trade space?”

  “I’d say so,” Mao said, nodding. “Tenbrook can’t make moves there quite as easily. He might have the audacity to come at us in that setting, but we’ll be back in civilization, at the very least. We won’t be able to play to our strengths, but we shouldn’t need to.”

  “That’s still a long way,” Golding pointed out.

  “Yes. And Tenbrook will take the hint when he doesn’t find us or any sign of us where he’s looking. He’ll come.” Mao stopped and rubbed her chin. “But if we can break away from Doyle, we can stall him without a lot of risk to ourselves.”

  “That would be a convenient outcome,” Major Compton said, leaning on his console. “But maybe not for Doyle. We’d be gambling with his life again.”

  “Yes, but I’m not seeing alternatives.”

  “We have to find out what’s going on with Oasis,” the major added.

  “It’s not like we don’t have intelligence resources already out here,” Mao told him. “We always have.” She sighed. “But I agree—we should check it out.”

  “Then we’re not diverting course?” Woodhouse asked.

  “Not until we see for ourselves,” Mao said, grimacing. “Then we’ll correct and make for the trade route.”

  “What does Mr. Doyle think?” General Dayal asked mildly.

  “I don’t care,” Mao replied immediately. “He doesn’t get an opinion at this point. I’ve already lost a man for him. He’ll do what I tell him or he can walk home alone. Nothing else? All right.”

  Normally that would’ve been their dismissal, but Captain Woodhouse spoke up.

  “Ma’am, I’d like to take a closer look at what we pulled from the shuttle wreckage.”

  “I’ve already archived the data,” Mao said. “We’ll send it back when we have long-range coms. Do you really have that kind of time on your hands?”

  “I’ll make the time, Commander.” Woodhouse sounded firm. Mao raised an eyebrow, but nodded.

  Bjorn watched him leave the bridge.

  “Is that all right?” Golding asked, after the hatch had closed behind him.

  “Yes.” Major Compton got up from his console and stretched. “He’s got his head on straight. We can’t ignore that shuttle. We have a responsibility to the Imperium. We know EI had to have assets out here, but right now we don’t know if they’re alive or dead. We don’t know what’s going on.” He gave the bridge crew a stern look. “We’re all relieved that we’re not getting shot at, and that’s overshadowing how strange this is. That we’re not seeing or hearing anyone. That’s not something we can be relieved about.”

  “Don’t let his curiosity trump the mission,” Mao said to Golding, sighing. “Keep an eye on him.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We’ll be within sensor range of the station soon. Then we’ll have answers.”

  Bjorn left the bridge without a word. Far down the spine, he could see Woodhouse stepping into the infirmary. He wouldn’t find any evidence of Bjorn’s tampering unless he was looking for it, but Bjorn didn’t have much faith in his luck. He didn’t know how Woodhouse would react to what he and Diana were doing, but Bjorn needed to be there in case he did stumble onto something.

  He found Woodhouse in the lab chair, decrypting the Ganraen files.

  “Curious, LT?” he asked without looking up as Bjorn stepped into the infirmary.

  “You said that shuttle was part of an evacuation. We need to know why.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Tell it to her, though.”

  “She’s focused on the mission.” Bjorn closed the hatch. “What have we got?”

  “Not much. There’s no real data from the colony in the shuttle’s systems, but there were some bodies in there, because Lydia did pick up holos and copied the data. One of them belonged to some kind of physician or lab tech, so I’m looking at his most recent entry, and I think I just got lucky.”

  “He recorded his thoughts?”

  “He gave us a lot. He might not have had much else to do aboard the shuttle before things went bad.”

  “Does it say how things went bad?” Bjorn asked.

  “Not in detail. There’s a microorganism on the planet’s surface, something their decon couldn’t protect them from. It’s lethal. Maybe it followed them.”

  “That shuttle wasn’t destroyed by a microorganism,” Bjorn said. “But it was corroded. Is there something that could do that?”

  “I don’t know. But it sounds like that planet’s more than just a rock.” Woodhouse shrugged and looked up at him. “And that’s an issue. Because accor
ding to our data, a rock is exactly what we thought Nidaros was. And we wouldn’t be wrong about that. This. This communications blackout. This mission. I’m telling you, something isn’t right.” Woodhouse got up and tugged at his EV suit irritably, shaking his head. “LT, don’t let your guard down. And take care of Kladinova.”

  “What?” Bjorn paused at the hatch and looked back. “Why do you say that?”

  “Do you know about her? Who she is?”

  “A liner. A big one.”

  “She’s a prodigy. A genius. I looked at her flight data from the battle. She did more work out there than the other three fighters combined.”

  Bjorn nodded. “I know. Like you said, she’s a genius.”

  “Maybe she’s the reason we have tiers and bloodlines. But it’s gone to her head. She’s reckless. Warfare with Everwings isn’t a ballet recital. It’s fringe science. This technology is too new. There’s a reason research on synapse syncing and Harbinger are forbidden. We’re out of our depth, LT. Mao knows it. That’s why she’s working so hard to keep us moving. Don’t let Kladinova get out of control, or we’ll just be short another pilot.”

  20

  “BY the Empress,” Sergeant Golding said, rising to her feet.

  Bjorn knew how she felt.

  Commander Mao and the bridge staff gazed in shock at the image on the viewer.

  “It’s not possible,” Woodhouse said, shaking his head.

  “It’s right in front of us,” Mao murmured.

  Oasis. The station wasn’t large, not by galactic standards. It hadn’t begun as a station, merely a colony ship. But people had been building onto it for the better part of a century. It had grown into a bizarre chimera of metal and carbon shielding.

  There were dozens of what appeared to be twisting limbs jutting out from the central body, and all of the outer extremities were connected by tubes, lifts, and even old-fashioned walkways enclosed in hexagonal shielding.

  Except for a few emergency lights, the station was dark. Bjorn could see only a few dozen ships in dock. There should have been hundreds. One vessel was floating aimlessly, and there was a good deal of wreckage. Some of those walkways were shattered, and there were massive dents and impact scars on the shields of several exposed atriums.

  A coolant leak on the underside of the station trailed away, a wide swath of gold against the black of space.

  This hadn’t come as a complete surprise. The communications silence had led the crew to expect something out of the ordinary. But no one expected to find a truly empty station still largely intact.

  Bjorn was at a loss. So was Mao.

  “Does anyone have any thoughts?” the commander asked weakly.

  Woodhouse swallowed, his eyes still locked on the screen. “I think it’s obvious what happened here.”

  “Go on.”

  “Nidaros. The planet that colonial shuttle came from, the colony world. Oasis wouldn’t be the ideal refuge point, but you can’t deny that it’s the closest. They wouldn’t have many real ships. If you were evacuating that colony, where would you go?”

  “You think the colonists came here?” Golding asked skeptically. Bjorn didn’t blame her. Oasis wasn’t the sort of place where you’d expect a helping hand. But perhaps anything was better than what had threatened them on the surface of this Nidaros planet.

  “I doubt they had a choice. And they brought it with them. Whatever they were running from.” There was a faraway look in Woodhouse’s eyes.

  “What do you mean?” Mao had noticed his expression, and it clearly alarmed her.

  “Ganraen separatist colonists are not on the cutting edge, technologically. And pirates are even worse off. The colonists couldn’t stop this thing. Look, most of the ships are gone. When people realized what was happening, they got out. And they may have taken it with them. But they won’t all be going to one place. They’ll take it all over. I don’t know how many of them will live long enough to get there, but their ships will. And they’ll spread it further.”

  “Woodhouse—” Compton began, but Mao spoke over him.

  “When a ghost ship shows up at your door, you scan it for this reason,” she said, folding her arms. “They’ll just be quarantined. Even galactics don’t just open their airlocks.”

  “Will that even matter? Look at that station. They’re heading for Free Trade space. These people don’t have Evagardian technology to protect them. If that would even protect them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if it’s undetectable?”

  It might’ve been Bjorn’s imagination, but Mao seemed to turn a little pale. “Not to us,” she said finally.

  “We didn’t pick up anything on the shuttle,” Woodhouse pointed out. “But we know it was there.”

  “We know it was there at one time,” Golding countered. “It could have died off. If there was an organism that corroded the shuttle, the shuttle depressurized, and it probably couldn’t survive without atmosphere.”

  “That’s possible. But something was interfering with our sensors.” Woodhouse spread his hands. “I have my own suspicions. Commander, what do you want to do?”

  “What do you think we should do?”

  “Normally I’d say we have a duty to warn the fleet,” Woodhouse said, pointing at Oasis. “This is obviously a security threat.”

  “And?”

  “I wonder if we need to.”

  Bjorn braced himself for what was coming. Woodhouse was out of patience.

  Sergeant Golding’s eyes narrowed. “Woodhouse, you’re out of line.”

  Mao looked resigned. “Let him talk.”

  “Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t warn anyone,” Woodhouse said. “Unless we wanted to abandon the refugees and go back. Because we can’t use long-range communications. And why is that?”

  “Nelson didn’t tell me. And she didn’t confirm that the signal jamming is imperial in origin,” Mao added. Bjorn didn’t like the look on her face. She knew where Woodhouse was going with this.

  They all did.

  “But it obviously is, and we know that because we know no one else has the resources to black out an entire system. It’s us.” Woodhouse shrugged. “And our government expects us to put that together and assume it’s for operational security. For us. Support for us,” he said, tapping a finger on his console. “To make it more difficult for the pirates to coordinate against us.”

  Indeed, that had seemed like the likeliest scenario. But to rob millions of people of the ability to communicate would be a human rights violation on an unprecedented scale.

  In theory no one in the Imperium but citizens and the Empress herself had any rights. In practice, everybody had rights, and those rights were, for the most part, carefully protected.

  The fleet could never black out an entire system officially, so the narrative was that Demenis just happened to be dark when the Lydia was conducting operations there.

  But that didn’t line up, and Bjorn knew he wasn’t the only one who couldn’t swallow that story. The strategic advantage granted by the blackout was offset by the isolation that came with it. Alone in the dark, the final decision always rested with Mao. With a weapon as powerful as the Everwing system, the High Command would always want to be directly involved. With a last-minute replacement like Mao in control, doubly so. They probably would have bent over backward to prevent the communications blackout, if only so they could get combat data from the Lydia for the sake of the future of the Everwing program.

  In the end, the only way to read it was that there was something more important than the Lydia.

  “But you can’t believe that,” Woodhouse said. “It’s not about us. They’re doing this for a reason. And we’re looking at it. Someone discovers a microorgansim that can do this to an entire station, and suddenly we want to annex Demenis?” He shook his head and t
urned his back on the viewport. “We aren’t here to kill pirates.”

  “Then what are we here for?” Major Compton asked. The temperature on the bridge had dropped, and even Bjorn was a little surprised that Woodhouse was publicly airing these suspicions. It was career suicide, at the very least. Yes, everyone knew that Evagardian military intelligence operated outside the law.

  But you weren’t supposed to talk about it.

  “To kill witnesses,” Bjorn said, moving to stand beside Woodhouse, who looked up in surprise. “Those witnesses just happen to be pirates.”

  “Witnesses to what?” General Dayal’s voice was cold.

  “This,” Woodhouse hissed, pointing at the viewport. “This is containment, but our people aren’t just containing the biohazard; they’re containing information. They don’t want anyone to know it exists. How long has Oasis been like this? We didn’t even know. Don’t you think we should have known? Us? This was supposed to be our destination.”

  Mao’s face had lost all expression. Bjorn couldn’t believe she wasn’t shutting this conversation down. Golding was giving the commander a desperate look, but Mao was ignoring her.

  “There’s only one reason our people wouldn’t want anyone knowing about this,” Woodhouse said, sweeping the bridge with his gaze. “You all know it.”

  “Empress save us.” Compton ran a hand through his hair. “You think the fleet wants it.”

  Golding swallowed. “Weapons development.”

  Woodhouse was trying not to laugh. “It’s perfect.”

  “Wait,” Mao said, holding up a hand. “What do you mean, Woodhouse? How is it perfect? We have weapons. Weapons that can do so much more than this.”

  “Yeah,” he said, smiling at her. “But they’re ours. This isn’t a weapon. This isn’t an act of war.” He gazed out the viewport at the wreckage of Oasis. “This is just a natural disaster. There’s no bad guy here.”

  “We didn’t do this,” Golding told him, raising her voice. “The colonists brought it here. Didn’t they?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” Woodhouse shrugged. “I don’t think it matters at this point. Rather than warn people about this possible threat, our government may be suppressing information to ensure that no one else gets their hands on this thing. That is what matters.”