Paying the Price (Book 5 of The Empire of Bones Saga) (2 page)

Jared had arrived with a small, old destroyer and a slow freighter converted to do science. He was going home with more than a hundred. Even with the surviving officers and men from
Spear
,
Shadow
, and
Ginnie Dare
helping to fill needed roles—both on his fleet and on Boxer Station—that left them with few Imperial personnel. Wallace had lost the light cruiser
Titan
and the destroyer
One Bullet
with all hands.

He’d robbed the destroyer
New York
as much as he could, but Captain Kaiser needed her core team to work her ship. Her ship didn’t have the same level of automation as the Old Empire ships. He’d considered leaving
New York
here, but he knew the woman would refuse that order. And Fleet Command wouldn’t be happy, either.

Jared had insisted that everyone get Fleet implants. That way they could work on any ship, if required.

It amazed Jared that they’d been able to repair so many badly damaged ships in such a short time.

This wouldn’t have been possible without the oversight of the AI on Boxer Station. Carl Owlet had used clean code to make a new personality for it that would be loyal to humanity and the Empire. It was able to juggle repairing multiple ships much better than a human team could have.

That was possible because the AIs were truly sentient. That was the last big shock the New Terran Empire would have to accept. And Jared had made it hard to ignore.

With the desperate need for command personnel, he’d reassigned Zia Anderson to command the Fleet carrier
Zeus
. He’d considered his original executive officer, Charlie Graves, but Zia was the more aggressive of the two. And Charlie was completely happy commanding
Courageous
.

Zia’s previous slot as his flag captain went to
Invincible
herself. Or rather the AI that resided inside her. The AI knew the ship better than anyone else possibly could. Kelsey had made an Imperial ruling that the AIs were people and so entitled to give oaths of service.

Invincible
’s AI, who’d decided to take the name Marcus, now had a commission as a Fleet captain. Boxer Station’s AI—which had chosen the name Harrison—had one as well. That would give Fleet Command apoplexy and cause the Imperial Senate to implode.

The crew had been a little spooked to have an all-seeing captain, but they were adjusting. They’d even found a crash test dummy somewhere, made it a uniform, and strapped it into the command chair on the bridge so they’d have someone to look at when reporting.

Marcus used the speaker in the chair. And he didn’t use what he heard or saw in his oversight of the public areas of the ship in his captain persona. He kept it segregated and the crew knew how the subroutines maintained their privacy. It was working surprisingly well.

With the three flip blockers the scientists at the Grant Research facility had built, they could lock down Harrison’s World, Pentagar, and Erorsi from Rebel Empire incursions. Except for when they needed to perform maintenance on them.

That didn’t account for the weak flip points, though. They’d have to be very careful using them.

Commodore Sean Meyer had two battlecruisers, four heavy cruisers, and six destroyers to guard Harrison’s World. He’d work hand-in-hand with Coordinator Olivia West to ease the planet into the New Terran Empire without letting most of the people know about the change in management.

Someday, the general population would learn the truth. Just not right now.

Pentagar was getting a number of ships, as well. They’d watch over the base on Erorsi, too, until more ships arrived. Since Jared was taking a long, unexplored path home, they’d only accompany him part way.

By his best guess, it would take another six months to finish the final repairs on all the ships in his fleet. It would take even longer to get them fully manned with trained, enhanced personnel. He shuddered to think about how long it would take to work through the remaining tens of thousands of derelicts.

They’d brought the mines in the asteroid belt back online, reestablished the automated fabrication units, and now had a mobile station to disassemble ships too badly wrecked to fly again. They called it the breaker. It salvaged what parts it could and melted the rest down. The critical and rare elements went into new parts.

The crew there also pulled the dead from the wrecks and sealed them in body bags. If the medical teams could reactivate the person’s implants, they made note of their names and copied the data stored in implant memory.

The cargo holds on several of the transports held the tens of thousands of bodies they’d recovered so far. Fleet was going to have to come up with a new means of burying their honored dead. The Spire couldn’t hold the many millions of corpses in these ships.

The lift doors slid open and Doctor Leonard walked onto the flag bridge. Kelsey was with him.

She smiled at Jared. “I hear we’re about to go exploring.”

* * * * *

Kelsey eyed her brother critically from behind her cheerful expression. He looked exhausted. That was understandable. He’d been putting in twenty-hour days for the last nine months.

His implants and medical nanites reduced his need for sleep, but there were limits. Four hours a night wasn’t enough. Not over that long a timeframe.

She’d tried to put her foot down and discovered there were some things she couldn’t order him to do. She shuddered to think about how he’d have been without teams of people working behind the scenes to take tasks off his plate.

Maybe once they started back toward Avalon he’d get some rest.

“I don’t think exploring is quite the right word,” Jared said. “We’re only sending a probe. Another probe, actually. This makes what? Eight?”

“Nine,” Doctor Leonard said. “Perhaps we’ll get this one back. If not, we’ll have to ponder over what we missed on the long trip home.”

“And we’re leaving on time,” Jared said sternly. “You have sixteen hours. Any more than that and you’re out of luck.”

“I’m quite certain we won’t need that long,” Doctor Leonard said. “This will either work or it won’t. I took the liberty of sending the probe out earlier today. A second probe will monitor this side for us. We can signal it whenever you’re ready.”

Kelsey linked her implants to
Invincible
’s scanners. The weak flip point was only fifteen light minutes away. She saw the system layout in her mind and noted the delayed readings from the probes.

She had been working hard over the last few months and had mastered the basic operation of her Raider implants. She could now process data as quickly as it came in. Using the processors in her head to spin off tasks was becoming second nature. She’d even gotten used to the ghostly voice of Ned Quincy in her mind.

Mostly.

Thankfully, he didn’t seem inclined to speak much unless she spoke to him first. Once she had time, she was going to have to figure out how to move him somewhere else, if they could figure out how. Perhaps he could be of use on
Persephone
, like Marcus was on
Invincible
. He wasn’t nearly as complex, but he seemed to be a sentient AI.

“Send the go signal, Marcus,” Jared said.

Kelsey felt the transmission leave the ship.

“Command sent, Admiral,” the AI said. “It’s programmed to make the trip and immediately return. We’ll know in half an hour if it was successful.”

She leaned up against Jared’s console. “While that happens, I have a few things to run by you.”

They talked about last-minute loading details until her implant timer indicated the probe would have made the transit and the data was about to arrive at their location. She could see Doctor Leonard was busy reading the full data stream from the probe staying in the Harrison’s World system, but it made no sense to her. It was focused on the flip point and too technical.

The first probe vanished…and reappeared a few seconds later. It immediately indicated it was in distress. The battle screen had failed and many of the systems were offline.

“What the hell happened to it?” she asked. “Was it fired on?”

“I’m getting the scanner recording now,” Marcus said. “I’m forwarding it to you.”

The view from the probe was of deep space. It saw the weak flip point in its scanners. When the signal came across to flip, it did so.

And intense radiation bombarded it from every angle on the other side. The battle screen held up almost as long as it took the flip drive to cycle and take the probe back to their side.

The view of the system beyond the flip point was indistinct. It was as though space was foggy.

“What the hell was that?” Jared asked.

“I believe I understand,” Doctor Leonard said as he stepped up beside Jared’s console. “The other system’s sun has gone nova. The destination side is far too close to either a neutron star or perhaps even a black hole for the probes to survive more than a few moments.”

Kelsey shook her head. “Well, that certainly explains why none of them came back. And it means we’re not going over there, either.”

“Actually, that’s not a given,” Marcus said. “I’ve analyzed the strength of the radiation and a ship’s battle screens are capable of protecting it. Only the probe’s lack of power caused its premature failure.”

“Admiral, might I mention that this is an unprecedented opportunity to study such a phenomenon?” Doctor Leonard asked. “We have no records of anything like this in the Old Empire databases and we might not be back this way again anytime soon. Might we use one of your ships for a few hours? Other than the natural dangers, the system probably doesn’t pose any additional risk.”

Her brother looked between the scientist and Kelsey. “Okay, but only if you make the trip on
Persephone
. Her scanners are more than capable of getting you the data you need. You only have half a day. We’re leaving on schedule. I’m serious.”

Kelsey was more than a bit surprised Jared was allowing her to go. He must be even more exhausted than he looked. Still, it sounded interesting.

“We can do that,” she said. “Doctor, what are the chances you can detect other flip points in that system?”

“Slim, but not impossible,” he ventured. “Weak flip points are out of the question. We’ll be able to find the one linking to Harrison’s World again because we know precisely where it is, but the chaotic environment there will overshadow any others.

“We can use the ship’s scanners to locate gravimetric anomalies like planets and regular flip points, though. If they aren’t too far away from us, that is.”

She grinned. “Well then, what are we waiting for? We have a supernova to explore!”

Chapter Two

“Is that thing safe?”

Carl Owlet looked over at Fleet Captain Aaron Black. “It should be. Why?”

“It could go right through you—and the wall behind you—if it malfunctions. You don’t have Princess Kelsey’s strength. Hell, I’m not even sure
that
would be enough if it went rogue.”

The graduate student gave the Fleet officer a suitably unimpressed expression. “Don’t be ridiculous, Captain. Everything will be perfectly fine.”

“Famous last words,” the other man said. “I’ll just move over here and watch from behind this handy blast shield.”

The two of them were down in one of the rooms used to test weapons inside the Grant Research Facility. It had plenty of protection for observers and the labs around it. If it could handle plasma weapons, it should be safe enough.

Probably.

Carl took a deep breath and tried to put the worries Black had raised out of his mind. Yes, he only had normal human strength. Well, maybe a little less. He was only seventeen and a bit on the scrawny side.

His latest creation sat on the table in front of him, looking like the prop from an old play. He’d taken some artistic license with it, admittedly. That old pre-Empire vid Kelsey had insisted he watch had influenced both his stylistic choices and some of the programming he’d designed for it.

As a weapon, it looked…short. But, that was kind of the point. Thor’s hammer was a unique sort of thing.

After she’d raved about the rather primitive special effects and acting in the vid, he’d sat bolt upright that night with the idea fully formed in his head. It was straightforward engineering using the newly discovered grav technology from the mobile weapon systems the AI had been using.

Since they had both power generation and grav capability all wrapped in one package, the real challenge had been making a shell that could protect the controls and designing the programming to make it work.

That had taken four months of cutting his sleep cycle short. An hour or two stolen between working like a dog to get the new ships up and running. He couldn’t complain, though. Everyone had put in the same amount of hard work and it was about to pay off in a big way.

Captain Black had come into this project late. While Carl could design the parts, he wanted someone with more experience in building a robust weapon to do the final construction.

The staff here had really come through. He’d never have thought of some of the things they included as a matter of course. And some of the design changes they suggested were brilliant. They had access to the highest technology of the Old Empire and they’d been working with it their entire lives. He had a lot of work to do just to get into their league.

They’d created a custom shell for the hammer that was both a stunning replica of the weapon in the vid and virtually indestructible.

The Old Empire had been working with some very cutting edge hull metals using partially collapsed matter. While nowhere in the same neighborhood as something like neutronium, it still weighed a wickedly large amount. Without the built in grav generator, he’d never be able to pick it up.

And with the grav generator working to keep it somewhere, not even a Marine Raider could move it if the wielder didn’t want them to. That also fit with the myth behind the vid.

That left the control functions. A normal set of Fleet implants could only work within fifteen meters. That’s why the Old Empire used headsets to amplify them.