“Narbonne.”
“Hah!” She picked up a spare suit and threw it at him. “So some little trollop with big eyes and even bigger…”
“Did you have a spare suit,” he cut her off hastily, “because you knew I’d end up in your room?” He adopted what he hoped was a roguish grin.
She abandoned her attempt to tease him about Narbonne. It wasn’t a big deal for her; she’d taken leave there herself, after all. “Chance favors the prepared mind, Marine. Assume each mission will be a success and plan accordingly.”
“Why, Colonel…” He adopted a scandalized tone. “Was I a conquest?”
Another giggle. “More like a pacification.” She backed into her armor and it started wrapping around her body. “Resistance was negligible.”
He struggled into his under-armor suit. “The resistance never had a chance; there were collaborators controlling all key targets.”
She chuckled and Paul wondered if she’d found some way to put on the warrior with the suit. He’d been hoping for another giggle, but it seemed he’d have to wait for the next ‘shower’.
He backed into his own armor. “We’ve got something really disturbing down in the hangar bay,” he told her. His suit closed and he turned to see her dark eye tattoos were back on. He definitely felt he was talking to the warrior now.
“At least you aren’t telling me I have to rush down there and look at it,” she allowed. “I have MacGregor telling me I need to look at some weird thing down in the engine room — as if a combat officer is any help figuring out alien technology — the ordinance officer is insisting that I need to inspect the forward ammunition lift and the cook is screaming green bloody murder about the rations.”
She gave him a wry smile. “At least you’re just telling me what you’ve found rather than dragging me down there.” She tested her helmet snapping it shut and open. “If I can stop complaining long enough for you to get a word in, that is.”
“We’ve got a couple thousand empty stasis pods down there,” he told her. “There were DNA matches to some of the missing Vermillians.”
“They took the missing citizens?” She test-flexed her joints. “What the hell for?”
“Well, I figure getting them out of the Imperium would tie up a loose end, but I think it has to do with the fact that the Grays are all clones. They’ve been body-hopping for thousands of years. They must have run out of original cells a long time ago.”
She nodded. “We were briefed on that before coming out to the Rim. They’re probably several copies removed from the original material. They’re staring down the barrel of a whole lot of genetic problems.”
“And those problems are accelerating,” he added. “Each new iteration has shorter telomeres, meaning all the bodies in the series have shorter lifespans. The rate at which they depart from the original copies is increasing.”
“So are you suggesting they’re using our people for research?”
He took a deep breath. This might lead them down an even more dangerous path than the one they were already on. “Yes, I think they’re hoping to find answers from a younger species.”
“Hang on,” she put a hand on his shoulder. “Stasis pods… Our people may still be alive, or some of them, at least.” She shuddered. “Agash, what if…” She shook her head. “No, they wouldn’t conduct that kind of research right on our doorstep. It’s unlikely we killed our own people.”
“Tel Qatshin is unlikely as well, except as a transshipment point,” Paul added. “It’s a logistics center, right?”
She nodded her agreement. “We need to figure out the most likely place…” Her eyes suddenly flashed in triumph. “I don’t know if I’m a genius for thinking of it or an idiot for taking so long!”
“What?”
She grinned. “Guess what that makes you?” She started for the door. “Come on. We can get the ship to tell us where they were taken.”
They entered the bridge and she took a quick look around, settling her gaze on a young blond officer leaning over the navigator’s shoulder. “Lars,” she called out.
“Ma’am?” The young man came over.
“Inspector Paul Grimm, this is Lieutenant Lars Nielson.” She waved a hand toward the young man. “When he’s not serving with the dragoons, he’s a trader. A lot of the Gray material you find in the Imperium was imported by his family.”
Paul had an idea where this was going. “You can read Gray, Lars?” he asked.
A nod. “Passably, which is why I’m up here instead of down in the hangar.” He nodded at the bridge terminals. “We’re programming menu translations into the implant displays. Once we hive link them to everybody, we can have translations for all the action stations.”
Julia stepped in close to the young man and lowered her voice. “Lars, we need you to get into the records and find out if they brought large numbers of Human bodies or prisoners aboard. Can you do that?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He gave her a guarded look, then shrugged. “Shouldn’t be too difficult.” He activated a holo-screen and started entering commands in Gray glyphs. “Just setting up some guiding parameters and we are… searching.” He pressed a green icon and lines of data began scrolling past. Several thin windows began popping up.
“Whoa,” he muttered softly. “Folks, we’ve got more than just a few Humans being carried on this ship.”
“Pick one occurrence and run the bridge records from the moment they’re brought aboard,” she ordered.
A holographic crew appeared on the bridge. Urbica’s dragoons jumped back in alarm at the sudden resurrection of the Gray bridge operators.
“Sorry, folks,” she called out. “Just looking through the logs.” She opened a visual room and moved the log projection, restricting it so that only Lars and Paul could see it with her.
“Speed it up,” she ordered.
The Grays’ actions became almost comical as they flitted around the bridge.
“Wait,” she hissed. “Stop the playback and reverse at normal speed.”
The projection resumed in reverse, though it was hard to tell when looking at Grays.
“There,” she said excitedly. “The star-field. It changed. Run us forward again.” She shifted the display to put the helm station in the middle of the real bridges open area.
The three clustered around the projected Gray, looking over its shoulder.
The projection stopped. “That line means ‘Transit Portal’,” Lars whispered, eyes wide with the enormity of what he was saying. “They’re also reading the beacon at Narsa, after the transit portal goes active, but the ship picked up the Human cargo through a ship-to-ship transfer in orbit around Agash.”
“Wǒ de tiān a!” Paul hissed. “They have wormhole technology, and they figured out how to build it into a ship?”
“But nobody outside the Imperium possesses that kind of technology,” Lars whispered back.
“And don’t you forget it,” Paul warned him. “Not a word of this to anybody, understand?”
Lars nodded, eyes wide. “You don’t need to tell me twice, Inspector. I understand what this would mean if it gets out.”
“Good man!” He turned to Urbica. “Maybe we should go down to engineering and have a look at the weird thing they found after all.”
It took them longer than they expected to find the engineering department, but they finally located the engine room. A slightly hefty man with a bushy mustache hurried over. “Thanks for coming down, Colonel. I know it may sound like I’m making a big fuss over nothing, but I can’t shake the feeling we’re looking at something important.”
“Inspector Grimm,” Urbica gestured to the heavy-set man, “this is Daffyd ap Rhys, best engineer on the Rim.”
“Daffyd.” Paul nodded politely. “What’s your concern?”
The engineer squinted at Paul. “Pardon my lack of comprehension,” he said slowly, “but do we really need an inspector from the ‘Eye’ for this?”
“We might,” she told hi
m. “Show us what you’ve got and we’ll decide whether it warrants the inspector’s presence.”
Daffyd nodded toward a portal. “First noticed it in here,” he said as he led them through the opening. He put his hand on what looked like a five foot thick tube that ran through the top corner of the small room.
“Curvature seemed to mean it ran all the way around the ship; just inside the hull,” he explained, “so I took a look at the on-board schematics and…” he opened a holo and it showed a cross-section of the Gray carrier. A massive, five foot thick ring ran around the inside of the hull and two thinner rings were mounted fore and aft at the same diameter.
Paul turned and shut the compartment door.
“Daffyd,” he began, “I’m invoking the Official Secrets Act. You signed a copy when you accepted the Emperor’s commission so I shouldn’t have to explain what this means, right?”
Daffyd simply nodded.
“Daffyd, I need to hear you respond with either ‘yes’ or ‘no’,” Paul demanded.
“Yes, Inspector,” Daffyd answered, still sounding a little incredulous. “I understand that I’m constrained by the Official Secrets Act.”
“Good. Then you understand that you’re never to repeat a word of this conversation to anyone unless ordered to do so by myself or one of my superiors. Nobody in the military is authorized to give you that order.”
A nod, followed by a slight expression of annoyance. “Yes.”
Paul nodded. “Daffyd, we have reason to believe this is a wormhole generator.”
“Cái bù shì!” Daffyd stared at Paul in disbelief.
“No, we’re dead serious,” Paul assured him. “This ship went from Agash to Narsa in the blink of an eye.”
Daffyd’s eyebrows dropped in the middle as he looked back to the schematics. He walked through the projection to look at it from the other side. A look of pure admiration dawned. “Jīngcăi!” he whispered approvingly.
He reached out and put a finger on the main, central ring. “This’d be the pincher,” he said. “I’m not a wormhole specialist but I understand some of the basics. This ring is probably what creates the fold in space, but I tend to think of it as more like a pinch than a fold.
“The really brilliant thing, if I’m right about this, is they’re using the other two rings to focus the hole. Putting a wormhole generator on a ship is pretty impressive, but the thing that’s raising the hairs on the back of my neck is the fact that they can create and focus a wormhole from the origin point.”
He looked up at them. “This would free them from using gates. They don’t need to open a hole between two gates in an existing system; they can just create a pinch and move the destination end to where they want to go.”
“The phrase I’m looking for here,” Urbica cut in, “rhymes with ‘clucking bell’.” She walked over to put a hand on the section of ring.
“This is a huge strategic advantage for them.” She shook her head. “How many ships might have this?” She turned to look down at the projection. “We saw no indications of this on the cruiser we captured, did we?”
“I wasn’t aboard her for very long,” Daffyd admitted, “but we didn’t notice anything.”
“That orbital controller mentioned ‘experimental equipment’ when we showed up at Agash,” she added. “We might have the only one.”
“And it might have a few bugs left in it.” Daffyd scratched the back of his head. “I know we need to keep this under wraps, but I need Lars down here to help me figure this out. I can’t read these Gray scribbles.”
“He’s helping on the bridge right now,” she told him. “We don’t want them steering us into a black hole by mistake, but as soon as he’s done up there, I’ll send him down to you.”
“Remember, not a word,” Paul said. “Only Humans possess wormhole technology.”
“I’d say you might want to re-assess that,” Daffyd advised him, “in light of what we’ve…”
“Only Humans possess wormhole technology,” Paul insisted. “Billions of Humans go about their daily lives, secure in the knowledge that the Emperor protects them. If word gets out that a fleet of Gray ships could show up without warning and reduce home-world to radioactive dust, we’d have anarchy.”
“Look, Inspector,” Daffyd held his hands up, “I hear you. I understand why I need to keep my pie-hole shut but, sooner or later, one of these ships is going to pop up in front of a planet full of honest citizens and the party line is going to look pretty thin.”
“Jiàn tā de guǐ!” Paul cursed angrily. “Why is it every time we end up having to escalate this gǒucàode errand we have multiple reasons ‘why’ and none for ‘why not’?”
He jabbed a finger at Daffyd. “Now look here; you’re going to crawl all over this thing and tickle out every secret. If we get this heap back to Home-world, the Imperial Engineering Corps will pull her apart and study every angle, but we’ll be presenting you as the inventor, got it?”
“But I…”
“But nothing, ap Rhys,” Paul cut him off. “We can’t have citizens thinking aliens are smarter than us, so you’ll do the interview circuit for a few months, refusing to go into technical details for security reasons…”
“And because I don’t understand them,” Daffyd added.
“And then, you’ll probably be made a colonel in the Life-Guards, which comes with an obscenely huge pension.”
“This is buggered,” the engineer whispered.
“And always remember,” Paul warned, “you need to keep this secret. If you ever tell anyone, even your cat, you’ll suffer such a bizarre death, nobody would ever suspect it was a government hit. A freak poultry incident or something like that. If we use this generator, some of the crew are going to figure it out, but we’ll just keep pointing to you and saying it was your invention. The public will believe the lie because it’s prettier than the truth.”
“Come on,” Urbica opened the door. “We need to find out where this ship was put together.”
“What are the chances we can make Daffyd the ‘father’ of shipboard jump engines?” she asked as they walked back to the bridge.
“Fifty-fifty.” He grimaced. “I’m rooting for the whole happy-and-rich-Daffyd plan, since the other probability is they kill all of us, destroy the ship and then stuff their heads back in the sand. We’re talking about CentCom and the Grand Senate, after all…”
He realized his focus was starting to shift. He’d always been primarily concerned with the machinations of the Nathaniel family but they’d practically ceased to exist, except for Tony.
Now he found himself forced into bigger issues. The fate of the Imperium now dangled in the balance and he suddenly felt the weight of billions of Human lives hanging on his every decision. If they screwed this up, the Imperium might just tumble down into anarchy.
They found Lars, still on the bridge, and pulled him aside again.
“We need to know where this ship was built,” Urbica told him. “We’re pretty sure this is an experimental engine so chances are good they’re only making them in one place.”
Lars nodded. “Something tells me we won’t be doing a whole lot of trade with the Grays anymore.” He started working his way through the main menus. “I wonder what the Snakes are like in negotiations…
“Hey, this might be getting close.” He enlarged a screen. “Congratulations on your purchase of a lightning class assault carrier. This vessel has many adequate qualities…” He grinned. “Looks like standard copy and they just paste in details. Here we are — ‘please direct any queries to the Tel Ramh shipyards for efficient and acceptable remediation’.”
“Holy Hell.” She was nearly laughing. “What a bland species. Many adequate qualities?”
“I’ll have you know it’s a veritable font of adequacity.” Paul asserted huffily.
The three of them broke out laughing.
“Oh, dear me,” Paul finally wheezed. “We’re starting a full-out war out here, aren’t we?�
� His tone didn’t really cast it as a question.
She nodded. “It would be irresponsible not to. If we give the Grand Senate any wiggle room, they’ll make peace and the Grays will throw everything into building a war-fleet of wormhole-generating ships. We need to disrupt their program at Tel Ramh, find our missing people at Narsa, save Santa Clara and then go home to scare our leaders into crushing the Grays.”
“Easy enough,” Paul quipped, “aside from the fact that they’ll be throwing everything they have into destroying this ship.”
She took a deep breath. “That’s why we need to move fast.”
See, the Maintenance is How They Get You...
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Tony turned from Urbica to see if Paul was laughing, but no luck. “Kuángzhěde!”
“Crazy maybe, but it’s no less true, for that,” Paul assured him.
In the interest of security, they’d brought Tony over to the Sucker Punch as soon as they reached the rendezvous. They were looking at the ship’s schematics in Urbica’s quarters and Paul was surprised to feel a little resentful of Tony’s intrusion into what he considered to be a private space.
“We need to figure out how we’re gonna bring this back to the Imperium without being killed for it,” Tony asserted.
“We’re working on it.” Paul waved at their chief engineer. “This here’s Daffyd ap Rhys, the man whose inspiration will lead to the development of point-controlled wormholes.”
“Got a fever from eating at a dodgy walk shop down in Vermillion,” Daffyd offered. “It came to me while I was losing weight from both ends, if you follow my meaning…”
“Oh… that’s great, Daffyd.” Tony wrinkled his nose ever so slightly. “Thanks for that.”
“So, we need to put this engine to work,” Julia announced, “and go smash the hell out of the shipyards that made it.”
“It’s clear across the other side of Gray territory,” Tony ventured. “Does that mean we wait here with the Dauntless again?”
“No reason why you have to,” Daffyd declared.
Everyone turned to look at him.
Rebels and Patriots (Imperium Cicernus Book 3) Page 16
