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

by Jay Allan

  The AI had done immensely complex calculations, factoring in the position of the nearby ocean—what was left of it—mountains, the remains of what appeared to be bits of an old transport line, and it had assigned an Eighty-one percent probability that it had brought Pegasus down within a kilometer of what Andi sought.

  Actually, an annoyingly precise 81.074%, which Andi was sure was some kind of bullshit the machine generated to make itself seem more important. The AI had also added the somewhat annoying caveat that its analysis relied on the accuracy of the data Andi had provided. Somehow, it pissed her off, having her own AI give her a disclaimer.

  Even the machines are well versed in CYA…

  She pushed those reactions away…and focused on what she thought of the odds, assuming they meant anything. Eighty-one percent was pretty good by most standards, but when the survival of so many people, of everyone she loved, hung in the balance, that nineteen percent seemed like a dark void, pulling her in.

  Even if they were close to what they had come for, that didn’t mean they would be able to find it, that what they sought would be there, or that it even existed anymore. Imperial data storage media were usually durable, and what she had come for could have endured over the centuries.

  But it could have been vaporized more than three hundred years before, too.

  She stood on the sandy soil, next to a section turned to glass by the heat of Pegasus’s engines. If the AI was right, she was standing near the center of what had once been the capital of the empire, less than a kilometer from the imperial palace itself.

  Though it appeared little, if anything, remained of that vast structure. No doubt, it was a primary target for someone…

  If she’d interpreted her research correctly, if her translations had been accurate, if the records she’d examined had been reliable…she was standing almost exactly at the sight of the old imperial intelligence headquarters.

  The building was gone, along with all the nearby structures. There were crumbled chunks of debris, some masonry and some jagged shards of metal. Andi had seen imperial steel before, but she still marveled at the brightness of the completely untarnished material. She leaned down and picked up a piece, wiping it on her sleeve. A sheen of dirt came away, and the steel gleamed as though it had just come out of the foundry.

  “It’s a pretty amazing vista, Vig…but we’ve seen sites like this before.”

  “Nothing like this, Andi.” A pause, as Vig looked around, a stare of amazement on his face. “The scanners suggested there were underground gaps and caverns just below us. From the looks of things around here, the city was bombarded with some kind of kinetic weapons, mass drivers or something similar. It’s possible the impacts fractured the geological structure below, that some sections of the city, most of it even, sank down before they were obliterated. Three centuries is more than enough time for the dirt to cover it over, especially with this wind.”

  Andi looked off to the east, the direction from which most of the air currents flowed. She closed her eyes against the gritty dust in the breeze, and she reached up and pulled the goggles on her head down. She looked out again, squinting, as though anything she saw would be meaningful. “This planet is a wreck, Vig. They destroyed it. Not only the city…but the oceans, the weather, even the mountains look half collapsed. They turned their capital, a world that was home to countless billions, into an utter ruin.”

  “Are we so different, Andi? How close have we come to destroying what little we’ve managed to rebuild? The empire stood for ten thousand years. Can you honestly say you believe our own civilization will?”

  Andi didn’t answer. Vig knew her response to that question. There was no need to say it.

  “If there are caves below, we’ve got to find a way down. If the buildings are truly buried, under meters—or kilometers—of dirt and rock, we’ll never find it.” Pegasus wasn’t large enough to carry full-blown excavation equipment, and even if it had been, she hadn’t thought about it. She wondered for a moment about lifting off, using the ship’s lasers to bore into the ground…but that could just as easily cause a massive cave in, or destroy any artifacts that still existed.

  “We’ve got some idea where to start, Andi. The AI produced a map of underground gaps and caves. It may not be entirely accurate, but Pegasus’s scans are pretty powerful.” Vig paused, looking at Andi’s unconvinced expression. “Look, Andi…if the buildings are collapsed, if it’s all a big pile of debris, or it’s buried outright, maybe we don’t have much chance. Perhaps we might as well head back and do what we can at Striker. But it the bombardment caused a whole section to sink down, if it’s open down there…if there’s a way in, we might be able to find the old intelligence headquarters. Their data storage vaults would be highly secure. They could very well have survived the bombardments that destroyed the city.”

  “Maybe so, Vig…maybe so. Anyway, we came this far. We’re not going back empty handed. Andi could feel her determination building, her strength returning. The chances of her people making it past the enemy and finding the imperial capital had also seemed miniscule. Yet, now she stood on ground the old emperors had walked upon, where the throngs had once gathered. She wasn’t going to fail now.

  She simply refused to accept that she might not find what she had come for…and she dared the universe to challenge her on that.

  * * *

  “Two weeks, Vig. Two weeks and nothing but dead ends.” Andi pulled a small rag from her belt and wiped the sweat from her face. Her people had been searching almost without rest, crawling through every bit of surface wreckage, and exploring every crevice or opening in the ground. She couldn’t say they’d found nothing. They’d uncovered enough artifacts to rival any fortune the Confederation had ever known, enough even to crash the markets for imperial technology. They’d also more or less confirmed they were in the right place, or near it. The planet was indeed Pintarus, or at least half a dozen broken chunks of massive structures had borne that name, carved into surviving masonry or etched into almost indestructible imperial steel.

  Andi was also sure they were in the correct place on that fabled planet. A hundred bits and pieces of detritus had proven that, almost beyond any doubt. But the ancient headquarters of the imperial intelligence services, the location that held the files Andi had seen referenced, the records of the fight to defeat the Highborn, were still nowhere to be found.

  “It’s been two weeks, but I wouldn’t say we’ve found nothing. We know we’re in the right place…and if we can’t find what we’re looking for, we’ll go back and then return with a larger expedition, one with the proper equipment…” The volume of Vig’s words lowered, and Andi knew he had realized the problem. Pegasus, with surprise, with a stealth unit, with a lot of luck, and the fortune to win a battle against a Highborn ship, had barely made it. Now the enemy was no doubt more watchful, driven by the loss of one of their vessels to increase their security, even in the backwater sectors of the coreward Hegemony. Pegasus would be lucky to get back…the chance of leading some kind of major expedition all the way to Pintarus seemed unfathomably remote.

  No, if they didn’t find what they had come for, and soon, they never would. At least not before the Highborn destroyed the fleet…and embarked on their subjugation of the Rim.

  “Andi…over here.”

  Andi turned. She recognized Ellia’s voice immediately, and she could tell from the excitement in the tone, the Hegemony’s foremost expert on imperial history and lore believed she had found something.

  “What is it?” Andi jogged toward the sound, even as she shouted back her question.

  She turned a corner, around a small pile of dirt and rocks, intermixed with debris. Ellia stood there, with a pile of broken masonry she’d pushed aside…revealing an opening about twenty centimeters in diameter. Andi raced over, grabbing the small lantern her comrade handed her. She held it next to the gap, and she pressed her face forward. There was a large opening inside, a tunnel stretching beyond
the reach of the lamp…and heading down into the ground.

  Andi turned and exchanged glances with Ellia. It wasn’t the first thing of the sort they’d found, but it was the largest. And it was almost exactly where Andi had expected the old intelligence headquarters to be.

  “Vig! Lex! All of you. Over here now…and bring all the excavation gear we’ve got.” Andi was excited, even as she instinctively tried to restrain it. She certainly wasn’t an optimist my nature, nothing of the sort…but for some reason, she believed they had just found the way to what they were seeking.

  She reached up, pulling at the edges of the hole Ellia had opened, tearing away chunks of dirt and broken pieces of debris with her bare hands, even as she heard the others coming up behind her.

  * * *

  Andi stepped down the path, scolding herself for moving too quickly, for exercising none of the caution one of her experience should be expected to exhibit. And then she ignored her own warnings yet again.

  Her foot rolled off a loose rock, and she almost lost her balance, but she recovered, and continued on as wildly and recklessly as before. The tunnel—and it wasn’t really a tunnel, at least not in the sense that it was a deliberate path someone had created—continued down from the surface. One side seemed to be mostly the wreckage of a massive building of some kind, and the other was predominantly loose rock and dirt…looking far less stable than the cautious, deliberative part of her mind liked.

  But that part of her was utterly subordinate at the moment. She realized that for all her insistence on taking the dangerous journey, her determination to find what she had come for, she hadn’t really believed there was a chance.

  Until now.

  There was something ahead, an opening of some kind…and even more astonishingly, some kind of light source. It wasn’t bright, nor did it provide much illumination in the twisting tunnel, but it meant there was some kind of power source still functioning.

  That could be good…and it could be very bad. Andi had fought her share of imperial security systems before, but she shuddered to think of the protections that had surrounded the central core of the capital, and even more, the headquarters of the empire’s intelligence service.

  But nothing could restrain her. Every impulse to show caution, every fear of what might lay ahead, was countered by the face of her daughter, of all people in the vast and tumultuous region of the galaxy still inhabited by humankind, the one person for whom she had come the most.

  She followed the path another five or six meters, and then she put her foot down…and the rocky ground underneath crumbled. She fell forward, her body flooding with adrenalin as her foot slipped into nothingness, and her body began to follow. The dim light gave her a view into the distance horizontally, but as she slipped into the abyss in front of her, there was only darkness.

  She had been too reckless, and now she was going to die.

  Then she felt something on her, her jacket tightening, pulling back. She was transfixed, staring down into the black depths, consumed with fear for an instant that seemed to last a lifetime…and then she realized someone was pulling her back.

  She turned her head, even as she fell backwards, on top of the man behind her.

  Vig.

  He’d been coming along just after her…and she realized immediately, she owed her life to his quick instincts. Her wild urge to race down, to see what they had found, subsided for just a moment. She was trembling, and even as she struggled to control it, she felt her stomach convulse, and she leaned over, emptying its contents. She coughed and gasped in some air, and then she turned her head again and looked at her shipmate and friend. “Thank you, Vig.” It seemed inadequate, but it was all she had.

  “My pleasure, Andi. You’ve pulled me out of worse before.” He had slid out from under her, and he was pulling himself to his feet. “I’d wager I owe you more than a few from back in the day.” He reached down, extending his hand to her.

  Andi tended to react poorly to proffered help, almost defiant in her independence. But Vig’s aid had just saved her life, and she grabbed his hand and accepted it again, this time to bring her aching body to its feet, and to steady herself. She stood still for a moment, silent, taking a series of breaths, trying to calm down. Then she turned and stepped forward, paying far closer heed to the ground in front of her. The chasm that had almost claimed her stretched along the left side of the tunnel. The narrow passage itself widened just ahead, into a broad flat space, overlooking an immense open area, a vast cavern, formed when a section of the capital had slipped down into planet’s shattered crust.

  She stepped out onto the small ledge and she stopped and stare, utterly stunned by what lay before her.

  The great chamber extended beyond sight in front of her, and before her eyes stood the greatest marvel she had ever seen. Immense pillars, some laying at various angles, others almost straight, and atop them, statues, huge stone and metal statues, depictions of men and women, standing tall and proud, adorned with strange and elaborate regalia.

  And beyond, disappearing into the dimly-lit distance, were buildings, or what remained of them, vast and imposing, speaking, she knew somehow without any real evidence, of imperial pride and might. Some seemed reasonably intact, others had fallen in on themselves, ravaged by their downfall beneath the surface.

  Andi looked out, over the stunning panorama. She was unable to speak, to pull her eyes away, even to think of anything, save one startling realization. All she could do was marvel at what she saw, and repeat the same thought again and again.

  We found it.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  CFS Dauntless

  Alantra Vega System

  Year 327 AC (After the Cataclysm)

  Tyler Barron sat in the center of Dauntless’s bridge, trying to keep his face from twisting into a dark grimace. He had never been happy with his decision to advance into Occupied Space, and he’d been fighting doubts since the moment the fleet set out from Striker. The reasons he’d agreed, even overruling Clint Winters’s objections, were still valid. From the Confederation Senate to the Hegemony Council, the political leaders had been growing impatient. The Masters wanted to reclaim their lost systems, and the Senate wanted the war to proceed, so it could end…they could get back to their normal pursuits of sleazy deals and building political power.

  It wasn’t just the politicians, though. There were reports of unrest from the Iron Belt worlds, and signs the pressure was building throughout the Confederation. Worse, perhaps, Barron couldn’t imagine the nations of the Pact could match the production levels of the Highborn, or at least exceed them by enough of a margin to make up for the technological difference between the two sides. He’d considered it a hundred different ways, and he couldn’t come up with one scenario where his people weren’t losing ground by waiting. He’d have preferred the enemy come to him for the final showdown, but they hadn’t obliged him in that regard, and as much as he’d valued the period of relative peace and happiness with his family, the bill for that had finally come due.

  But nothing had him more on edge than the fact that events so far had only supported the wisdom of his decision to move forward. The enemy appeared to be overextended, struggling to defend the vast expanse of space they had seized. The fleet hadn’t passed through any major Hegemony systems yet, at least none that were densely populated with highly developed industry, but they were getting close. And every effort the Highborn made to stop them had failed.

  He should be happy about that, he realized, but it only weighed heavier on him. It was counterintuitive, he knew, but he was sure of it. Something was wrong…the more he thought about it, the more certain he became. But he couldn’t call off the offensive on an unsupported hunch, and even less so because enemy resistance had been weaker than expected. He’d believed the situation with the Senate and Council had left him no choice before he’d left with the fleet. If he returned, back to his starting point, deterred by a series of encounters the politicians would ch
aracterize as victories, the shit would truly hit the fan. There might even be calls for his resignation…and he honestly didn’t know what he would do if it came down to that. He had no respect for the Senate, or at least not for the Senators themselves. But the idea of seizing power himself was repellant to him, and all the more so because he believed he could pull it off. Tyler Barron didn’t want to be a dictator. He didn’t want to be a politician. No thought horrified him more. He simply wanted to serve a republic, just one run by honest representatives, and not villainous slime. One that would instill pride in him as he led his spacers forward in its defense.

  You might as well ask for three wishes…

  “Admiral, we’re getting readings from the lateral transit point.”

  Barron was startled by the report, and he turned and looked over at his aide’s station. He even felt the tension, the dark mood weighing on him, fade a bit as the familiar sound of Atara Travis’s voice worked its way through his distraction. She’d continued to serve in her role as his senior aide over the last few years, of course, if on a much reduced duty roster. But there was something different, something in her tone that he hadn’t heard in four years.

  Atara was back. The real Atara.

  He felt relief, not only because he cared about his friend, but because he knew he would need her. She’d been a vital part of every battle he’d won, and if he and his people were going to find the road to victory in the current conflict, Atara would be a vital part of the team.

  “Full scan. Starboard pickets are to launch a spread of probes.” Barron paused for a few seconds, and then he looked down at the fleet display, checking which battleship was closest to the transit point. “Triumphant is to launch a patrol to investigate the point.”