Empire Ebook Full

by B. V. Larson

  I sat back after that and sipped a cool, caffeinated drink. The ball was in their court now, and I had no idea how this was all going to play out. I would be damned if I was going to watch Crow’s thugs blow up Earth ships for no good reason. Especially not if they were trying to make the run to Eden.

  Our radio signals had to travel across about a billion miles of space and back before we got an answer. The return message came in about an hour after my own transmission, due to the distance. The range was shrinking rapidly as our fleets converged, but it was still tremendous.

  “We’ve got an answer, sir,” Ensign Rodrigues said. “But it’s not from the big fleet—it’s from the Imperial ships.”

  I waved for her to put it through. The words echoed in our ship. Once again, a snippet of martial music played. I was beginning to wonder if that was S.O.P for all Crow’s ships now.

  “Colonel Riggs, this is Commodore Decker. You have no mission here, and have been officially deactivated. Star Force has been disbanded, and although I’m sure this is difficult for you to accept, I implore you to do so, Dr. Riggs. If any of your crew can hear this, they should know you have no authority, and they are under no obligation to follow your orders. We would appreciate it if you withdrew from this system. Any interference in Imperial affairs would be a mistake. Decker out.”

  I glanced around the chamber at my staff. “How do you read that?” I asked.

  “They’re scared and bluffing,” Sandra said immediately. “We should force them to surrender and if they won’t, we should fire upon them.”

  “I didn’t spend the last several years in space killing aliens so I could destroy Earth’s finest vessels,” I snapped. “There has to be something better than that.”

  Miklos leaned forward. “Sometimes, Colonel, unpleasant things must be done in order to prevent more hideous unpleasantness. This is often the essence of a civil war.”

  “I need specifics, people, not philosophies. In a few hours, we’ll be in range of their heaviest beams.”

  “I’ll give you a specific,” Sandra said. “Blow them out of space before they slaughter those unarmed ships that are running to us.”

  I had to admit, that was pretty specific. I nodded glumly. “We’ll wait to hear what the second fleet has to say. They’re farther away, but their message should be beaming in soon.”

  In the next few minutes, I was provided with a new shock. The second voice that came from the speakers was feminine and distinctly familiar.

  “This is Captain Sarin of Star Force. I’m officially requesting your aid, Colonel Riggs. We’re running from Earth, but we left with Crow’s permission. Now that we’re out of the system it seems that he has changed his mind about letting us emigrate to your system. I understand the situation more clearly now. He let us leave because it would have been a PR nightmare to fire on Star Force transports. But now that we’re out of range of Earth’s cameras, his thugs have orders to force us out of our vessels and leave us adrift in space. We don’t have many weapons, but we will fight. It’s up to you to decide whose side you’re on. Sarin out.”

  Sandra stared at me. She looked troubled. I stood up slowly. This was big. I had to think. I walked down the corridors to the mess hall and grabbed myself a meal. I chewed and stared into space. Outside, the twin yellow suns known to us as Alpha and Beta Centauri circled one another in a tight, timeless dance.

  I felt I now knew why the Imperial ships had been so anxious to stop us. They hadn’t wanted us to reach Alpha Centauri. We weren’t supposed to have met up with Sarin and her refugee transports.

  Sandra followed me and sat down. She opened a squeeze bottle of beer and pressed another into my hand. We both drank. The nanites had gotten better at brewing, but we still grimaced slightly with the first swallow. Beer from a soft bottle never tasted quite right, but at least it was cold—refrigeration was one thing you never had much trouble with in deep space.

  “What are you going to do, Kyle?” Sandra asked quietly.

  I looked at her. There wasn’t any anger or jealously in her eyes today, I was glad to see. Often, Sandra could be petty and selfish when it came to sweeping events. But this, I could tell, had gotten through to her. She wasn’t worried about Jasmine and I. She was worried about thousands of lives.

  “There are a lot of people out there on those ships, and they’ve been screwed over by Crow,” I said. “The trouble is, I don’t want to declare war on Earth. Not now, not ever.”

  She nodded. “I understand that. It goes against everything you’ve tried to do. But you’ve done it before. You killed the troops invading Andros Island.”

  I nodded thoughtfully. “My hand was forced then.”

  “Not really. You could have let the Pentagon have the factories. They would have made you a consultant or something.”

  I smiled. “I would have loved that, wouldn’t I? I suppose you’re right, I don’t have any choice. I’ll have to do what I can to save Sarin and whoever is with her.”

  “You know who they are. They’re loyal Star Force troops. They’re the ones that would not submit to Crow, the ones you left behind on Andros when he seized power in your absence.”

  I felt a guilty pang. I’d been out on the frontier for a long time, not bothering to think too hard about what was happening back on Earth. I’d been so busy planning out future colonies and blasting aliens, I hadn’t kept Crow in check.

  “What was I supposed to do?” I demanded, feeling a hot rush of anger. “One man can only be in one part of the cosmos at a given time, no matter how talented he is. I can’t fix every problem everywhere at once!”

  She chuckled and patted my hand. “That sounds like my Kyle Riggs,” she said. “You are forgetting something, though. You’re greatest failure as a leader is not delegating authority. I’ve been reading books about it. This sort of thing happens often to capable leaders, you know. The smartest and best know they can do the job better than everyone else, so they micromanage everything. They spread themselves too thin and fail where a lesser man might have succeeded.”

  I stared at her for a moment. “Interesting theory,” I admitted. “And I know there’s a strong grain of truth in that criticism. So, what do you think I should do?”

  “I’ve already given you my advice.”

  “Blast them? Without further warning? Just put on a big smile and start the civil war I’ve been dreading and dodging for years?”

  Sandra nodded. “Look at it this way, it’s inevitable. If it must happen, you might as well strike first. If you let Crow destroy that support fleet, he will have struck the first blow and crippled us.”

  I thought about it, my mind swirling. It was too much for my brain right now, and I realized she was a few jumps ahead of me. Here I was, about to lead a rebel force, an independent force declaring itself free of Earth’s rule. I wondered if all colonist rebels in history had felt as conflicted as I did now. I was still an Earthman, still loyal to my world and my species. But I couldn’t stand by and watch them abuse my fellow marines. I felt torn by a dozen loyalties in a dozen directions.

  “Why can’t we all just stand together and fight the damned machines?” I asked aloud.

  “If we did that, we wouldn’t be human,” she said.

  I wondered if she was right.

  -17-

  I ordered the entire fleet to accelerate to flank speed. This caused an immediate problem as my single cruiser was faster than any of my stubby little gunships. We were soon outrunning them. I figured I would solve that problem later. I wanted to get in this game. If the other fleets all met up and fought a battle six hours before I could get there, then all my soul-searching and heartfelt transmissions were meaningless. I had to have assets on the table to be a player.

  Shortly after I ordered my ships to accelerate, I composed a warning for the Commodore Decker and his Imperial cruisers.

  “Decker, this is Kyle Riggs,” I said, dropping formal titles. If he didn’t respect my rank, then I wasn’t about to
give him credit for his, either. “I’ve decided to maintain the peace in this system. As far as I can tell, yours is the only force that’s stirring things up. I see a peaceful civilian fleet traveling in an open system, while your ships have fired upon both my ships and those of our allies, the Worms. Now, you’re threatening unarmed refugee ships.

  “As the highest ranking official of Star Force in this region, I’m ordering you to stand down. Prepare to be boarded and inspected. Arrests may occur, as per Star Force protocol. I assure you, you and your crews will be provided due process, despite your inexplicably hostile acts. Possibly, this is all some grand misunderstanding. The facts will emerge at your trial. Riggs out.”

  The rest of the crew stared at me as I made this speech. Some grinned hugely, while others gaped by the end. Only Marvin seemed unperturbed. “Message transmitted, channel closed,” he said.

  I leaned back in my chair and allowed myself a slight smile of amusement. At the very least, my message would cause Decker to stand up out of his command chair and rage at me. I wished I had a live vid feed to witness his reaction. Just thinking about it warmed my heart.

  The message flew out into nothingness. The reply took less than twenty minutes to come back, as all the ships in the system were getting closer together every hour.

  “Colonel Riggs,” Decker said. “I’m afraid you do not comprehend the situation. But that is immaterial. What matters are the details of your threats and accusations. You’ve admitted to being in league with the Worms, who have attacked and destroyed Imperial ships without cause. Further, you have threatened to arrest an Imperial officer in the process of executing legitimate orders. I have specific orders regarding you directly from the desk of our magnificent leader, Riggs. According to the Emperor, I’m to avoid engaging you if at all possible. But you’re making that difficult.”

  Decker paused for a moment, and I thought he was done. “Marvin,” I asked, “is that the end of the—?”

  “You’ve brought me to a decision point, Kyle,” Decker continued suddenly. “I have no choice. The Imperial Navy is going into action, and whatever happens, I want you to know that it was you who caused it all. Let the deaths of these rebels be on your head.”

  I was furious when I heard this. In the end it was I who stood up and paced, leaving my command chair behind. I asked my crew to get the channel open again, but Decker would not answer.

  “What do you think he intends to do?” Miklos asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious? He’s going to destroy Sarin and her refugees. He’s taking this opening to do what Crow really wants, to exterminate anyone loyal to me that he can.”

  “Do you really think he’d do that?” Sandra asked. Her eyes were big and dark. “I know Crow is a power-hungry bastard, but—”

  “It’s not just Crow we’re talking about, its Decker. He has ideas of his own, he always did. Crow has always been a schemer, but he’s got some sense of honor. I don’t know Decker that well, but what I do know doesn’t make me want to trust him.”

  “What’re we going to do?” she asked. “We can’t let them destroy unarmed Star Force ships!”

  “She’s right, sir,” Miklos said with maddening calm. “If we are beginning a new conflict, we need every supporter we can get.”

  I bared my teeth in frustration. Things were moving out of my control. I looked at the big holotank, hoping for answers. After a few minutes spent gauging distances, I figured I might just have a trick left in my empty sleeve.

  “Marvin,” I shouted, “get me into contact with the Worms. Tell them to attack the Earth cruisers. We can’t catch the cruisers in time, but they can.”

  “There will be a lot of lives lost, sir,” Miklos said, “on both sides.”

  “I know. But that’s going to happen no matter what we do now. And it’s just the beginning.”

  I talked to the Worms, and although they weren’t too excited about getting involved, they finally decided to honor their pledge toward me for mutual defense. I felt a bit sick as I arranged the turning of biotic against biotic, but I felt I had no choice. It was disheartening.

  Within half an hour, the shooting started. The cruisers got the first shots off, as they had the longest-ranged weapons. Their heavy beam emplacements stabbed out into the infinite night we know as space. They didn’t fire on the Worms, however. Instead, they began burning the tin cans my supporters were flying in. There were about three hundred transports out there. They were big, slow-moving targets. The cylindrical craft tried to evade the incoming fire with poor results. They applied their braking jets in a panic, and pumped out some defensive chaff and gels.

  But every second, the two groups came closer. The transports were bulky and either unarmed, or armed with weapons of insufficient range to strike back. Over the next hour or so, before anyone else could do anything, the cruisers took potshots at them, and they became increasingly accurate and harder-hitting as the range closed from extreme to long.

  “The first hit. One transport just blew up, sir,” Miklos said quietly.

  I gnashed my teeth. I wondered immediately if it had been Sarin’s ship. It was unlikely, of course, but it had to be somebody out there who’d just died in a flare of white, burning gases.

  “How far out are the Worms now?” I asked.

  “They’re overtaking the cruisers rapidly. About thirty minutes from now, by our estimates, they’ll be in range to do some damage. We’ll be joining the battle sometime after that, depending on the speed and course of the Earth fleet.”

  I nodded unhappily and went back to watching the Imperial ships fire on our helpless transports.

  “Why didn’t Jasmine bring armed escorts?” Sandra asked.

  I shrugged. “If I had to guess, I’d say that Crow made this a condition of their leaving Earth. They could go if they wanted, but they couldn’t take any warships. Of course, he sent Decker and his thugs after them. Once they left the Sol system and entered Alpha Centauri space they could be easily dealt with out of sight.”

  Six more ships blew up.

  “You have to do something, Kyle,” Sandra said. “Threaten them with annihilation.”

  I was both surprised and pleased by her reaction. She’d been insanely jealous of Jasmine in the past—due to lapses in judgment on my part—and it was good to see her so worried for the other woman’s safety. Of course, it wasn’t just Jasmine she was worried about. There were a lot of people dying out there.

  There wasn’t anything I could do. I could fire a barrage of missiles, but they wouldn’t reach before my beams, as we were accelerating. No, the missiles were best left until we were in closer range, or to chase down a limping, retreating foe.

  So I watched, and I winced with the rest of them when ships flashed white. Such magnificent explosions... The transports had to be fully pressurized to create such an expanding cloud of burning plasma, like bright, tiny nebulas in space.

  After the forty ninth transport popped, the Worms reached effective range. Whatever anyone had ever said about the Worms, I could respect their eagerness for a fight. They laid into the rearmost cruiser with every blaze of particles they could produce. I watched as the beams criss-crossed a region of space seemingly at random. In fact, the pattern of beams was unfocussed due to the distance, and there were gaps where the cruisers could dodge and attempt to escape.

  All the beams came together, bracketing the wounded cruiser, which had fallen behind the rest. The cruiser captain detected the incoming flares of radiation and slid to downward, from the point of view of the local Alpha Centauri’s plane of the ecliptic. We all watched, wondering if the Imperials would escape their fate. The Worms simply didn’t have enough range.

  But then, the guile of the Worm commander became evident. The pattern with the obvious gap had been a trap. A new surge of beams, held in reserve until this moment, fired in unison after the evading ship. They took the radiation directly in the aft section. There was a flash of heat, then a ripple of explosions as internal systems
were burned. After a few long seconds, the cruiser broke apart.

  No one on my bridge was cheering. We watched grim-faced as the Worms destroyed what had once been a Star Force ship.

  “If only the Macros could see us now, squabbling and killing one another over who will be leader of the pack,” I said bitterly. “They would laugh, if they possessed a sense of humor.”

  “The cruisers are slowing and coming about, sir. They’re firing at the Worms this time.”

  I winced again. The Worms had managed to take out one of the cruisers, but there were five left. The bad part was the Worms weren’t quite in effective range yet. Their particle beam weapons were fantastically powerful, but short-ranged. The two fleets were still pretty far apart, at a distance that was optimal for lasers, but not for radiation weapons.

  “Decker is turning on the Worms now,” Sandra said. “He’s really working them over.”

  I saw explosions amongst the small Worm ships. The pilots worked their heavy fighters with consummate skill. I was impressed as they slewed and spun. Still, each of the Imperial cruisers had six heavy guns, making a total of thirty long-range weapons firing in coordination. I cringed at every flaring hit.

  “Put up a count,” I ordered.

  The number went up in green, right below the blue number representing the number of our own ships. As I watched, the number of Worm ships diminished at a steady rate. Each salvo from the cruisers took out at least one of them, sometimes two or three. Spaced about ten seconds apart, the barrages of laser fire were devastating at this range.

  “Incoming message from Decker,” Marvin said.

  I blinked and gritted my teeth. “Put him through.”

  Honestly, I expected Decker to bargain. I expected him to tell me to stop this devastating waste, allowing him to slip away toward Earth while everyone stopped shooting at each other. I was willing to let him do it, too. I was willing to let him evade justice, and get away with the numerous murders he’d committed—just to end this slaughter. Unfortunately, Decker’s message was quite different.