Empire's Ashes (Blood on the Stars Book 15)

by Jay Allan

  Now, she looked out and saw fewer than three hundred vessels, a skeleton force by comparison. That hadn’t been a surprise, of course—she’d received word of Barron’s decision en route—and yet it still felt like one. Clint Winters was in command, of the rump fleet, and of Striker. She’d been advised of that as well, and she’d wondered just what kind of a knockdown drag out fight between the Confederation’s top two admirals it had taken to get the Sledgehammer to stay behind when more than eighty percent of the fleet set out.

  Now Colossus is here, too. That’s more power around Striker…but Admiral Barron is out there, and he will need this ship…

  Her ship increased the combat power of Winters’s forces, of course, by a considerable margin. But she wasn’t sure that mattered. If the enemy attacked Striker that would mean they’d already defeated Admiral Barron and the main fleet. And if that happened, the war was as good as over.

  She flipped her own comm controls, activating the priority line. “Striker Base, Commodore Eaton here, commanding Colossus. Please advise Admiral Winters we have arrived.”

  “Admiral Winters knows, Sonya…”

  Eaton recognized the voice immediately, and she decided she was utterly unsurprised that Winters had been in the control center awaiting her communique.

  “It might take a while to get Colossus settled in and the umbilicals in place. Not even Striker has a dock big enough for that monster. Why don’t you shuttle over in the meanwhile, and I’ll bring you up to speed.”

  “Yes, Admiral. On my way.” She cut the comm, an action that perhaps exhibited less than the requisite pomp and procedure for communications with the navy’s second in command, but Eaton knew Winters had even less use for such nonsense than she did. Of course, no one hated that sort of thing more than Tyler Barron. The fleet had become somewhat less officious in recent years, and it certainly hadn’t done anything to reduce combat effectiveness.

  She leapt up from her seat, turning toward the nav station. “Proceed with the docking instructions, Commander. And advise gamma bay I’ll need my shuttle ready as soon as possible.”

  “Yes, Commodore.”

  She nodded, and then she turned and walked across the cavernous room, and disappeared into one of the lift cars. After four years of endless repairs and titanic struggles with bureaucracy, she was back.

  And she was damned sure ready for a rematch with the Highborn. She just had to convince Winters to let her move forward to catch up with Barron’s forces.

  * * *

  “Number One, no one here doubts your intellect, nor your leadership abilities, but there are those suited to command in a crisis, and those who are not.”

  Akella stared across the table at Number Two. She’d once considered Thantor somewhat of a friend, and she’d mated with him as well, following the imperative their lofty genetic rankings demanded, but she had no doubt at all anymore that Thantor was her rival.

  No, he is my enemy…

  Akella used such labels cautiously. That was partly her own temperate nature, and partly her realization of just what an enemy was, a visualization made stark by the immense losses from the fighting at Calpharon. Thantor wanted her Seat, she was certain of that, and since her genetic rating was higher, the only way he could get it was to drive her to resign, or to have her expelled from the Council in disgrace. It had taken her a long time to realize just what drove Thantor, and she’d struggled with understanding it, mostly because she herself had no interest in political power. Her fondest wish was to be left alone, to retire to her study and her laboratory, and conduct research for the rest of her life. She served on the Council because it was her duty, and she took that obligation seriously. But she sometimes felt she was at a disadvantage in a contest against someone whose motivations she couldn’t quite comprehend.

  Now that the Hegemony was fighting for its life, she was prepared to put old rivalries aside, to join with her colleagues and do whatever was necessary to win the war. But it was becoming starkly clear that Thantor was not of that mind. He was scared, certainly, badly shaken by the loss of Calpharon and so much of Hegemony space. But he’d barely relented in his political offensive, and he ceaselessly blamed Akella for the recent reverses.

  “Number Two, you have made your position clear. Equally clear is the fact that you lack sufficient support on this Council to upend our leadership structure for your own political gain. I ask you now, as the head of this body, the leader of the Hegemony, and one who shares a son with you…set aside your ambitions while we struggle to save our society, and indeed, perhaps all humanity.” She’d hesitated to accuse him outright of conspiring to take her place, but then it all came out. She wasn’t sure if it was strategy, or simply fatigue, but she just didn’t care anymore. She wasn’t a diplomat by nature any more than a politician, and it wasn’t like the Council, the twelve loftiest genetic specimens in the Hegemony, didn’t know exactly what had been going on.

  Or how close she had come to defeat. She had four loyal votes, and Thantor did as well. The others had varied in their support, but it required a two-thirds majority to expel her, and that meant her rival needed all four of the centrists. He’d come close before the Highborn attacked Calpharon, but as so often happened, crisis and danger rallied the Council around the established power…and Thantor had temporarily ceased his efforts.

  But not for long.

  “Number One, I object to your characterizations, which are both farcical and baseless. You cannot…”

  “Enough!” Akella slammed her hand down on the table as she shouted, surprising no one so much as herself. She wasn’t the sort to lose her temper, but she was brittle, tense…and scared for Chronos and the fleet. The need to hide some of that, at least with respect to Chronos, only added to her tension. She could express her concern for the Hegemony’s armed forces, of course, and for its top military officer as a colleague. But she couldn’t admit to the true nature of her relationship with Chronos. Hegemony custom, and for Masters, law, forbade formalized and ongoing relationships. Sex was condoned for casual recreation, and for breeding with appropriate genetic partners. No one would question her decision to mate with Chronos, but the fact that the two were still deeply—and monogamously—involved more than five years later was a grave violation of Hegemonic rules and morals. Especially since Akella had failed to produce any further children in that period. She hadn’t dared have a second child with Chronos, though she had wished to. And she’d refused to even consider another pairing.

  If Thantor found evidence of her relationship, it might very well be what he needed to finally destroy her. In many ways, she would view removal from the Council a blessing, but not when her people were fighting for their lives. Thantor was a megalomaniacal monster, and not someone who could lead the Hegemony through its current nightmare. If he bested her, attained the top position, the Hegemony was doomed. She was sure of that…and she couldn’t allow it to happen, whatever it took.

  How long would it be before Tyler Barron told Thantor just what he could do, in anatomically explicit terms…

  And Barron was the more tolerant of the two senior Confed admirals. Thantor would be lucky if Clint Winters didn’t just shoot him where he stood.

  Akella realized she hadn’t followed up after her outburst…and neither had anyone else present spoken. She regrouped her thoughts, and she looked out over the rest of the Council. There was surprise, certainly, but she wasn’t sure if her anger had hurt her standing…or actually helped her.

  “This is no time for political maneuvering, nor arguments between us. Most of the fleet has departed from here, returned with the other Pact forces to the Occupied Zone. You will all recall that I was against this course of action and argued against it. However, I was also aware of the imperatives behind it…and that a majority of this Council was in favor. So, I say to all of you now, while our forces are engaged in this dangerous operation, until we have some news of what has transpired, let us put disputes and arguments aside. Put your
thoughts behind Chronos and his officers, and the thousands of Kriegeri manning the ships of the fleet. There will be time enough later for squabbling and posturing.” Her words were hard, and she spoke them with strength and edge. But she managed to push the anger back, to sound in every way like the strong and confident leader…and not the raving lunatic she felt she was becoming.

  It was a pleasing fiction, she thought, and she wondered how long she could maintain the masquerade.

  She could see by the nods all around the table, and the applause that soon followed, that she had gained the Council’s agreement. Only Thantor sat silently, and then, he too put his hands together and offered a short burst of unenthusiastic clapping.

  She had maintained control, put aside politics and internal disputes. For a while.

  How long that would last, she didn’t know. But if things went badly with the fleet, she knew any renewed rancor on the Council just might not matter at all.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Free Trader Pegasus

  Zeta Galvus System

  Year 327 AC (After the Cataclysm)

  “I can’t believe we made it this far with…nothing. No pursuit, no sign at all we’ve been detected. Not even more than just a couple enemy sightings.” Vig sat across from Andi on Pegasus’s bridge. The topic wasn’t new. Vig had greeted each system they’d entered with something similar, almost as though he was offering some kind of thanks to the spacer’s gods so common in legend.

  Or trying to convince himself their mission wasn’t as crazy as he knew it was.

  “The stealth unit does seem to be effective against Highborn scanners…at least when they’re not looking for anything.” Andi had grave doubts the mysterious imperial device connected to her ship’s drive would thwart a concerted Highborn effort to detect Pegasus. But the enemy had no reason to expect anything to be there, so with any luck, she and her people would be spared trying to evade intensive search efforts.

  Andi was grateful, too, though it was hard to focus on such small successes given the magnitude of her task. She’d argued with Tyler, insisted she had to go, assured him she could find what she was seeking…and now that she was deep into the occupied space of the Hegemony, she faced the stark reality that her data was pretty damned thin. It was a map, of sorts, a guide to finding what she sought. But there were plenty of holes in it, and it would take all the spacer’s fortune, and Badland’s adventurer gut instinct she had, to get them there.

  “I don’t like the sound the thing is making, though. I think I’m going to have Lex take a look at it.” She hadn’t mentioned that before, though it had been bothering her for days. The stealth unit didn’t sound all that different than it normally did, but she could swear there was something there, a vibration maybe. Something her gut told her wasn’t quite right. She’d considered having Lex Righter check it out before, but she’d hesitated. She didn’t want to make her crew even edgier and more scared than they already were, and as brilliant an engineer as Righter was, she knew the device, half new and half ancient imperial technology would be half magic to him. He would be feeling his way through, much as she was doing navigationally. But if she went wrong, they could always backtrack. If Lex made a mistake and the unit failed because of it, Pegasus was deep in enemy space and naked to the Highborn’s scanners.

  “Well, at least we’re out of the way here. A few populated planets in these systems…” Vig’s voice lowered, and a grimness crept into his tone. “…and a few it seems weren’t worth the effort to the Highborn.”

  Andi looked down at the deck. She knew just what her friend was talking about. They’d passed three worlds, two in one system and one in the next. From what she could tell, they’d never been heavily populated, no more than eighty to one hundred million each was her best guess. But those numbers had fallen dramatically…to zero. The Highborn had bombarded them from space and rendered them utterly lifeless. A population that size was no doubt a rounding error to beings who thought themselves gods, but Andi’s mind reeled at the vastness of the carnage and human suffering.

  “Yes, with any luck, we won’t see too many more enemy ships.” That was a hope more than a projection, but there was some basis to it. It was counterintuitive to think of the ‘coreward’ side of the Hegemony being more sparsely populated than the ‘rimward’ end…but that was the legacy of the Cataclysm. The area of space Pegasus was approaching had been the heart of the old empire, and by all legend and accepted wisdom, it had been virtually obliterated in that polity’s final death struggle. Civilization had survived, such as it had, in the Confederation and Hegemony, precisely because those sectors had been backwaters, far less important that the coreward zone…and more easily overlooked by the warring factions.

  “You’re right, Andi…I think we’ve come far enough that we won’t see any more Highborn ships…” Vig stopped abruptly, even as Pegasus’s scanner started beeping.

  It was a contact, a ship. Not a large one, but definitely of Highborn manufacture.

  And a lesson to Andi in making pronouncements projecting past fortune into the future.

  “Cut thrust.” She gestured toward Vig’s workstation as she snapped out the order. Pegasus had slipped past a few Highborn ships without cutting the engines entirely, but that was before the stealth unit started preying on her fears.

  “Thrust at zero, Andi. But I don’t think that’s necessary. Look, they’re moving along on their original…” Vig’s words ended abruptly once again. The Highborn ship had begun blasting its engines, decelerating.

  Andi stared at the screen, her eyes fixed, feeling almost as though they would burn through the display. The enemy ship’s action wasn’t definitive. There were multiple reasons it might decelerate, or change course. That realization made her feel a bit better. For perhaps ten seconds. Then her warning lights flicked on. Highborn scanning beams were moving across the space around Pegasus.

  The good news was, the enemy didn’t appear to know exactly where they were.

  The bad news was stark, though. That ship had clearly picked up something, and now they were looking for Pegasus.

  Andi reached out, flipping a series of switches, recalibrating her ship’s passive scanners. With some luck—that word again—she might be able to detect the enemy beams, get a heads up they were discovered before the enemy even knew.

  “Shut down the reactor, too, Vig. And tell Lex to stay down there, ready for…whatever we have to do. I’m going to need power immediately if we’ve got to make a run for it, so he needs to be ready for a crash start just in case.”

  “Okay, Andi…” Vig sounded a little shaky. The situation justified some fear, certainly, but she knew it was more than just the enemy. The words ‘crash start’ filled every spacer with a cold chill, and Andi knew very well the dangers of such a maneuver. Pegasus was a good ship, its systems top of the line. And Lex was the best engineer in space, this side of Anya Fritz. Andi figured there was no more than a three, maybe four percent chance he would lose it entirely…and turn Pegasus into a miniature sun.

  Still, that four percent was a cold thing to see staring back from the abyss.

  Andi’s eyes were fixed, locked on the contact on her display. The enemy had picked up something they considered suspicious, she was sure of that. But now Pegasus was playing dead. She’d be hard to spot even if the stealth unit was malfunctioning. Andi knew the generator was still working to an extent, but she no longer doubted her guess that it wasn’t operating at full effectiveness.

  “Andi…how long can we just sit here and wait?” Vig’s words mirrored the thoughts in her head. She was stubborn, in many way made of iron. She could sit and watch the enemy search fruitlessly for Pegasus for as long as necessary, if that was the correct course. Weeks, months…longer.

  But this time, she didn’t have longer. Tyler was heading deeper into the Occupied Zone. If she was going to find some way to help combat the enemy, she had to do it soon.

  “I don’t know, Vig…I just don’t kn
ow.” It was probably the most useless thing she’d ever said, but it was the plain truth.

  She sat and stared, waiting…knowing at some point, if the enemy was still there, she would have to give up and make a run for it.

  * * *

  “Alright, Lex…now!”

  Andi sucked in a deep breath, and she held it. The next few seconds would determine if Pegasus’s engines roared to life, beginning a mad dash to the transit point…or if her ship and all her people vanished in the fury of unleashed nuclear fusion.

  She wouldn’t know if that happened, of course. It would be too quick. She wasn’t sure if that was strangely reassuring or even more nerve-wracking.

  Lex Righter was down in engineering, and there weren’t many people out there she trusted more than her longtime engineer to handle such a delicate maneuver. But Righter had been brutally honest with her, and he’d reaffirmed what she already knew. However careful he was, however skilled, there was always an element of chance to such a desperate and dangerous move.

  She wondered if engineers could be given a course in mercifully lying to ship captains.

  A loud roar shook the ship, and the very structural elements groaned and creaked under the stress. Pegasus sounded like she was tearing herself apart, but at least that meant the ship was still there. A few seconds later, a wave of force slammed into Andi’s chest, pushing her back into her chair, and forcing that deep breath from her lungs.