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

by Jay Allan

  Now, with the flip of a switch, she would activate the solar collection facilities, the geothermal power generators, the two hundred fusion power plants operating off the planet’s tritium-rich oceans…and when she did, if her work had been done correctly—and her repeated rounds of testing had suggested it had been—antimatter would begin to flow into the specially-designed collection tanks, stored there in immense magnetic bottles until it could be loaded onto specially-designed freighters, and moved to the battlefront, to fuel the Confederation’s advanced new ships and weapons.

  “Admiral Fritz…all final checks are clear. All systems green. All stations report ready and awaiting your command.”

  Fritz took another breath, deciding a few seconds later that stress relief was a fantasy. No zen, balance, mind-centering crap was going to calm her down, not when she was about to open the floodgates to a torrent of antimatter. If all went well, it would take less than one thousandth of a second for the facility to produce more of the precious substance than every other source had in a century of Confederation history.

  That was more power than the human mind could easily grasp…and every bit of it earmarked for man’s foremost pursuit. War.

  She felt something like regret at that thought. Fritz wasn’t a dewy-eyed pacifist, not by any measure. Her life had been battle, repairing and maintaining warships so they could stay in combat. So they could survive long enough…to kill. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder what peacetime marvels such a quantity of antimatter could power, what great achievements it could fuel. Even for one of her grim determination, the fighting had become too much. The Confederation’s history, that of the entire post-Cataclysm Rim, had been filled with conflict and strife. But the last twenty years had seen almost nonstop war. Strangely, the past three years had been the quietest she could recall, though that calm existed under the shadow of looming invasion, and the dark and dismal threat of utter defeat.

  “Admiral? Should we…”

  Fritz turned toward the officer, and her glare silenced him mid-sentence. Her people didn’t exactly love her, as Barron’s spacers did him, but she knew she had their respect. And they were scared to death of her. Given a choice of one option, that’s the one she would have picked. It was the most useful.

  “Activate the refinery. Let’s start producing some antimatter.”

  * * *

  “Antimatter production has begun. The Quasar facility is operating at ten percent of expected capacity, but Admiral Fritz will shortly begin increasing that.” Holsten paused, looking out at the gathered Senate. He preferred to deal with politicians in small groups, or better yet, one on one. He detested addressing the entire Senate, but he hadn’t seen a way out of it this time. “Admiral Fritz has also requested a transfer to the front lines as soon as the operation has ramped up to full production.” Holsten knew there would be arguments, that many would want to keep the Confederation’s foremost engineer right where she was, watching antimatter production with a withering intensity that would make a hawk seem blind. But Fritz had been very clear when she’d accepted the task to oversee the construction of Quasar, and a return to combat status had been paramount among her conditions.

  “I can also advise you all that Excalibur has been dispatched to the front lines, along with roughly two dozen other new vessels. She should reach Base Striker in about six weeks.”

  “That is all well and good, Mr. Holsten, but I think this body would like to hear all of your intelligence on the situation in the Union. And I do mean all of it.” Cyn Avaria spoke out of turn, a departure from the Senate’s normal procedure. That wasn’t a particular surprise…she’d never given the slightest indication she thought the rules she imposed on others applied to her. She was one of the most powerful Senators, and the head of the Reds, one of the two dominant power blocs.

  She was also an absolute pain in the ass, at least as far as Holsten could see. He’d imagined some of his black ops people throwing her in the back of a transport a hundred times, but kidnapping or assassinating a sitting Senator was a bit too far, even for Gary Holsten.

  At least so far it was…

  “Senator Avaria, I was going to get to that in due time.” A lie, at least partially. He hadn’t really thought he’d get out of the briefing without discussing the uncertain and crumbling situation in the Union, but if the Senators had given him the chance to do just that, he’d have taken it. He’d secured Emmit Flandry’s promise not to bring it up, at least. But word had spread, and fear was growing.

  “I think now is a good time, Mr. Holsten.”

  God I hate her…

  “Of course, Senator. “The truth is, there is much rumor and fearmongering, and little hard data. Until recently, all intelligence suggested both that Sandrine Ciara’s forces were on the verge of defeating Villieneuve’s loyalists and that she intended to honor her overtures and establish a lasting peace between our nations. I have no reason, at least none based in hard fact, to assume that has changed in any material way.” Another lie. He didn’t have what he’d like to have in terms of data, but the information he did possess had been keeping him up nights. Still, there was no reason to unleash panic and chaos in the Senate. At least not until he could turn it to his own needs.

  “Please, Mr. Holsten…do not treat us as fools. You serve at the behest of this body, and you can be removed and replaced if you find yourself unable to meet your obligations.”

  Holsten mostly ignored the threat. He’d always kept enough information on the important Senators to secure his position…and somewhere along the line he’d stopped being amazed that none of them ever seemed to lack dark secrets he could discover. But he had an even better guarantee of his place as head of Confederation Intelligence. Tyler Barron. When Barron had first risen to prominence, Holsten had been somewhat of a guide and a protector. But those roles had been reversed. Holsten could have burned every one of his red files, and not worried for an instant about his position as the head of Confederation Intelligence. Not while Tyler Barron still supported him. The Senate knew Barron had contempt for their political games and corruption—and most of them despised the admiral—but more importantly, they also knew he was the one man who could likely rally the entire fleet behind him…and depose them all.

  Barron actually doing something like that seemed almost inconceivable to Holsten, but he also knew how the Senators’ minds worked. He doubted most of them could imagine someone not caring about political power…and that made Barron a tool he could use to keep them in line. A very powerful tool.

  Not to mention Barron was unquestionably the Confederation’s best hope of staving off the Highborn. The distance from the main front somewhat diluted the fear the Senators felt. But only somewhat. They’d all seen plenty of images and data, and they were scared enough.

  “I could come in here, Senator, and spew out baseless rumors and wild guesses, like those you have undoubtedly heard. But my job is to gather intelligence…reliable data on the situation in the Union. Until I have some basis in fact to report otherwise, I maintain that the likeliest scenario remains a victory by First Citizen Ciara’s forces.” He knew none of them would believe him—hell, he wouldn’t have believed himself—but it was the best he could do. If the Senate decided to divert forces from the main front, the consequences could be catastrophic.

  And if Gaston Villieneuve does have Highborn support, the effects of not doing so will be, too…

  He didn’t want to think about that.

  He didn’t feel good about minimizing the urgency of the Union front, especially since he was as worried about it as anyone on the Senate floor. But it came down to simple strategy. An existing threat took precedence over a potential one.

  And he wasn’t going to leave Tyler Barron hanging. If the Union became a threat, worse, one with Highborn support, he’d figure something out.

  Somehow.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Free Trader Pegasus

  Undesignated Imperial System 12<
br />
  Year 327 AC (After the Cataclysm)

  “There’s a lot of debris in this system, Andi. A lot. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it.”

  Andi was looking at the main display, thinking exactly what Vig had just said. There were dead hulks floating all around, the remains of various kinds of ships and other constructs. Hundreds of them.

  The system was a mystery to her, but according to her best analysis—and a few hopefully lucky guesses—she had reached her destination.

  The capital of the old empire.

  She looked out at the system, no fewer than three planets dead within the habitable zone, and two more just outside that looked as though they’d been terraformed to tolerable levels. A half dozen gas giants farther out, surrounded by halos of manmade debris, shattered wreckage Andi guessed they were the remains of once great constructions for harvesting tritium and helium-3 from the planetary atmospheres.

  She’d seen the great Core worlds of the Confederation, with their billions of inhabitants. But even Megara seemed like a backwater compared to the planet straight ahead. She tried to imagine the billions who had once lived there, the almost unimaginable population of the whole, massively developed system, but those thoughts were derailed, subsumed by the realization that all those people, those vast almost ungraspable multitudes, were all dead. There were no descendants, no ongoing civilization, no living legacy of their lives, only the silent death of an unimaginably large graveyard.

  The Rim had suffered badly enough in the Cataclysm and its aftermath, and she’d seen the dead, decaying worlds of the Badlands often enough, and up close to boot. She’d had somber thoughts there, of course, images of those who had once lived and worked in the places she’d visited, of men and women, probably not terribly unlike herself, or those she knew. But she’d never seen anything like the black and oppressive emptiness of the system through which her ship now plied its way. Pegasus hadn’t landed yet, and space was empty and open everywhere, but the sense of…haunting…was irresistible.

  She felt cold, surrounded by an eerie darkness, as though the very space howled with the screams of those long gone. Everywhere she looked seemed to be filled with ghostly faces, and ancient cries of terror and death. She’d always know the empire had been vast, its population enormous, just as she’d realized billions had died in the horror of the Cataclysm. But now she began to understand just how grossly she had underestimated the human cost of mankind’s great nightmare. The empire had stretched from where her people sat in their ship, all the way back to the Far Rim and the Periphery…and likely much farther coreward. Billions hadn’t died in the empire’s fall, she realized. Trillions had. Numbers like that were imaginable in a theoretical way, thinking cells in the body or atoms in a chunk of metal…but the thought of deaths in such numbers, each victim a man or woman, with a life, memories, loved ones, was almost impossible to grasp. It shook even Andi’s hardened psyche.

  She marveled at the incalculable wealth she saw, the raw value of imperial technology arrayed before her eyes…and for the first time, she didn’t care. She had all she could ever need, and the things she wanted in life now were beyond price. She’d forego a million ancient computer chips and the king’s ransom they would bring in the markets of the Confederation…for one fleeting second with Cassie in her arms, one touch of her hand on Tyler’s cheek, the merest feeling of his warmth.

  She hadn’t come for wealth, nor for artifacts to increase the historical record, save only on one subject. The Highborn. And what she needed wouldn’t lay in the shattered holds of ancient shipwrecks, nor in the gutted, shards of old orbital stations. No, her trail led to the capital itself, to the center of the vast, nearly planetwide metropolis that had served as the empire’s center and the seat of its imperial government. To the great vaults beneath the ancient city’s central zone, which she could only hope had remained proof against the ravages of war and the decay of time.

  “The imperial capital would have been a massively developed system, Vig…and it looks like this one fits that bill. The records specified the fourth planet as the capital. There were references to two moons as well…and the fourth is the only habitable planet here with two satellites.” She paused. “I think we have found what we’re looking for.” She was far from sure of that, but so far the system had passed muster in every way.

  Andi was exhausted, scared…worn to a nub. She’d long been used to the haunted nature of the Badlands, to the feelings of isolation that wore so heavily on prospectors and their crews…and drove no small number to early retirement, and sometimes madness. But this was something else entirely, and she felt as though she had left the domain of the living, and moved on into some dark dimension of the dead.

  She’d been driving herself to the brink and beyond…ever since the battle with the Highborn vessel. Pegasus had won that fight, and she’d come through it with only minor damage. And the enemy had been destroyed before they could transit and send a distress call.

  At least she hoped they hadn’t been able to get off some kind of message. But even if she had prevented her adversary from sending out a warning, she had no idea how the Highborn would react to a missing ship. Would they send vessels to search? Pegasus had won the fight because she’d had surprise…and because Andi and her people had gotten damned lucky. A missed shot, a more suspicious enemy commander, almost anything could have turned victory into defeat. Andi allowed herself the satisfaction of the win—that was almost an instinctive reaction—but she didn’t fool herself. If any more Highborn came looking for the destroyed ship, her chances of winning another fight were something between zero…and some tiny fraction above zero.

  She’d raced across the systems since then, working day and night with Sy and Ellia, analyzing the scanner data, matching it with their various sources, making snap decisions on where to go next. If she had indeed found the capital of the old empire, perhaps the luck that had seen her through the battle was still with her.

  But even if it was, Andi knew fortune was a fickle mistress. There was no guarantee past favors would be repeated…and as dangerous as the journey was, Andi had a feeling it was about to get worse.

  “Bring us into orbit around planet four, Vig. Our data mentions a great city, but I doubt we’re going to find anything but ruins, if that. We’ll pull in everything we can from the scans, maybe even send down a few probes. We should be able to get enough data to suggest that a vast city is—was—down there.” She took a deep breath. “And then we’ll land.” The words echoed in her ears, and it took all she had to control her nerves, to remain calm—no, that wasn’t quite accurate—to appear calm to her people.

  She heard a sound behind her, and she spun around, her hand reaching to her belt, to where her pistol usually lay. But she relaxed almost immediately. There were no enemies on her ship, and even the ghosts she could feel lurking around the system were unlikely to go stomping around the decks of her ship.

  “My people have rather more data on these core imperial provinces than yours, I suspect, if simply because our systems lie so much closer to these central areas of the empire than yours on the Rim.” Ellia’s head had poked through the hole in the deck. She finished climbing up the ladder onto the bridge, and she turned and looked over at Andi. “I do not know if I will be able to confirm that this if this is indeed Pintarus lying before us, but it does match all of the specifications we have of the empire’s capital world.” A pause. “Added to the fact that it also fits with your own data offers a compelling argument that we have reached our destination.” The Hegemony Master had been an invaluable addition to Andi’s efforts to track the empire’s efforts against the Highborn. She’d had some resentment toward Ellia and her people at first, lingering feelings from the bitter days when the Confederation had battled against the Hegemony. But those had quickly faded, and in addition to Ellia’s clear intelligence and extensive knowledge, Andi found herself just liking the Master.

  “Take the third station…t
he scanners are just starting to feed in some real data.” Andi gestured toward the often-unoccupied number three seat on Pegasus’s bridge. Her ship, its control room, its cabins, the various tubes and accessways that led into the depths of its structure and mechanicals, were utterly familiar to her, every control, every keyboard, every twist and turn. She’d never known any place in her life as well as she did her ship.

  But Pegasus wasn’t her home anymore. For years, since her days as a child fighting to survive the Gut, Andi had felt adrift, unanchored. Pegasus had been the closest thing she’d ever had to a home, and she’d developed a strong emotional attachment to her ship. That was still there, but it was different now. She had a home, a real home, at least she would if her family made it through the war. As much as Pegasus had served her well, brought her back from one dangerous mission after another, she was ready to let the vessel slip into her past. If the Confederation and its allies somehow defeated the Highborn, if they achieved the miracle of peace, Andi was ready to take one last walk through the corridors, and put the ship into permanent storage. Pegasus deserved a rest, and Andi had a family, a life to lead. Assuming either of them got the chance…

  “This all checks out so far, Andi. We know very little about Pintarus, but what we do have matches this system perfectly. The number and distribution of planets is correct, as are the general sizes of the planet’s two moons. There are the correct number of transit tubes. I could calculate the odds of encountering a system with so many similarities by pure coincidence, but I don’t believe we need the actual number to realize it is infinitesimally small.” A pause. “With the caveat that not all of our data on the system is certain, and much is based on conjecture and extrapolation, I would say it is very likely we have, indeed, found Pintarus.”

  Andi listened to Ellia’s words, and she found herself nodding gently. She agreed with her comrade’s logic and analysis, and she’d come to trust Ellia’s conclusions. She was satisfied that she had found what she’d sought, at least the planetary system, if not yet the secret of how the empire defeated the Highborn.