“Sir? What happened to the other ship?” Vichy asked.
“They self-destructed, attempting to take shuttle ten with them,” she replied. “Your people are fine, they underestimated the survivability of a Marine assault shuttle, but we only have one set of evidence now. Given what you’ve found, that makes me very, very nervous. Whatever happens, Battalion Commander, those prisoners and those artifacts must be extracted intact. We’re on our way to you, ETA ten minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
The channel dropped and Pierre stared off into the air for several seconds.
What the merde was going on?
Chapter Five
Morgan stood off to the side as the rescued prisoners were ushered aboard Defiance, wrapped in blankets the Marines had produced from their emergency stores. Vichy’s people had pulled thirty-seven people from the pirate ship…and taken exactly four prisoners from the crew.
“Susskind, I want IDs on these people ASAP,” she told the young man standing at her left elbow. The Speaker—equivalent to a full Lieutenant in the Duchy of Terra’s Militia—wore a blue uniform that contrasted with her own black and gold or the Marine’s dark green, marking him as one of the Imperial Navy’s military police.
The senior cop on Defiance, in fact. Morgan was grimly certain the cruiser really needed more than a single overstrength platoon of forty cops. In theory, Susskind could second bodies from the ship’s three hundred Marines, but Defiance had eleven hundred and fifty souls aboard.
Forty MPs didn’t seem like much against eleven hundred military personnel with all of the trouble they typically got into.
“We have some tentative IDs from Battalion Commander Vichy’s people,” Susskind told her. “I’m…hitting security barriers when I try to figure out where they’re supposed to be though, sir.”
Morgan sighed.
“That’s what I expected,” she admitted. “You’re not cleared, Speaker. Get the IDs and send them to me. Commander Rogers will conduct the interviews and the prisoner interrogations.”
“With all due respect, Commander Rogers is—”
“Cleared for this affair and you aren’t,” Morgan said grimly. “I’ve already got a note up the chain to request a broader clearance for Defiance’s crew, but I don’t have that authority.”
“Sir, they appear to be from an archeological dig,” Susskind pointed out.
“I know,” she confirmed. “And more than that is classified. Get those IDs, Speaker.”
She left Susskind behind as she saw Vichy emerge from the latest shuttle. There were no more rescuees or prisoners on this one. The Marine CO had apparently sent them back first, along with his wounded and dead.
“Battalion Commander,” she greeted him.
“Ma Capitaine,” he replied smoothly. Morgan had heard that some women found French accents sexy—it was apparently part of why her youngest half-sister was studying in Paris—but her first experience with them had been with a family friend she’d called “Uncle Jean” for fourteen years…and then “Sir” until he died defending Earth.
And in her mind, Pierre Vichy was a poor substitute for Jean Villeneuve, the man who’d successfully defended Earth against the Kanzi and Taljzi.
“Report,” Morgan ordered.
The Marine paused to consider the situation.
“Vessel is secure but crippled,” he said crisply. “Thirty-seven prisoners were rescued; all appear to be archeologists of some kind. The ship’s cargo holds contain a large quantity of cataloged debris presumably retrieved from a site of some significance and value.
“It all looks like rocks and broken metal to me, sir,” he concluded. “What is classified about all of this?”
“That’s classified,” Morgan snapped instinctively. “Commander Rogers and I are the only people on this vessel cleared for those operations.”
“Sir, five of my people died today,” Vichy said, very, very softly. “I believe it is reasonable for me to have need to know now. Especially if we will need to act on this data.”
As usual with Pierre, Morgan wanted to shut his pompous ass down. But he was right.
“Go get out of your armor and cleaned up,” she told him. “My office, at the eighteenth twentieth-cycle.”
Hyperfold communication was vastly faster than light but it wasn’t instantaneous. Defiance wasn’t large enough to carry the starcom receiver that would at least mean her answers could come instantly. Her communication loop was nearly two full cycles long—forty-six and a half hours.
She could see in the Frenchman’s eyes that he was aware of the same math. She was reading him in on her own authority.
“Fuck this up, Battalion Commander, and I will end your fucking career,” she told him flatly. “But you’re right. So let’s talk.”
“I won’t fail you, sir.”
To Morgan’s shock, the French accent was almost gone.
Morgan was on her fourteenth coffee cup of the day when Rogers and Vichy joined her in her office. She gestured them both to seats and studied them carefully.
Rogers looked beat. She’d spent the tenth-cycle since everyone had come aboard talking to the prisoners. Vichy, on the other hand, looked pristine.
Morgan could, intellectually, see that the Marine was attractive. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with perfectly defined muscles readily visible against his uniform. Neatly swept-back dark hair and aristocratic features completed a package that she knew had several of the junior women on her ship swooning.
She found him too perfect, almost fake. But she’d grown up in the household of the Duchess of Terra, surrounded by heavily muscled, attractive men and women whose job was to die so her stepmother didn’t.
Muscles didn’t do it for her, in either gender. Her somewhat doughy red-headed second-in-command was more to her taste, though Bethany Rogers was probably the most off-limits person on the ship. And no one aboard the ship wasn’t off-limits to the Captain.
“System, seal the room under Lost Dragon Protocols,” she ordered aloud. Nothing visibly changed, but she could feel the moment the Faraday cage closed.
“We are now fully disconnected from the ship’s electronic systems,” Morgan continued. “This meeting is now being recorded on an isolated system that is physically present in this office.
“Rogers has been read in on Lost Dragon previously, but for the record, I am reading Battalion Commander Pierre Vichy in on my authority in the aftermath of today’s events, as recorded in the primary mission report for Defiance, Cycle one seventy-eight, Long-Cycle eleven hundred after Ascension.”
Also known as September 9, 2219. Even aboard an entirely human-crewed ship, the A!Tol Imperial Navy ran on Imperial time and calendars, not Terran.
“Are you familiar with the Dragon Protocols, Battalion Commander?” she asked grimly.
“I am, sir,” Vichy told her calmly. His accent was back but he’d eased off on it. She was starting to suspect he’d actively played it up around her in the past, which did not make her less grumpy with the man.
“Each of the individual Dragon Protocols covers a different set of secrets,” Morgan told him. “The penalties for breaching secrecy on a Dragon Protocol remain the same.”
The Imperium didn’t go in for the death penalty, but breaching a Dragon Protocol would see someone spending the rest of their life working at hard labor in a hostile environment.
It wouldn’t be a long sentence.
“There is background information to our operations that is blatantly not included in the Lost Dragon dataset,” she told Vichy, to a confirming nod from Rogers.
Unlike Rogers, Morgan knew that information as well. She was definitely not allowed to share that one.
“Lost Dragon is a particular subset of what I suspect to be a series of operations along our rimward frontier, digging into information we’ve acquired from unknown sources about Precursor sites and, potentially, further Precursor megastructures.”
Neither of the other two officers in
the room had been involved in the Arjtal Campaign that had brought down the Taljzi. They’d seen images and sensor data of the planetary-scale constructs of the race that had flourished in the galaxy before any current known civilization and then suddenly died off fifty thousand years before Morgan was born.
Morgan had seen the structures herself, stood aboard ships in the presence of shipyards that had drawn on gas giants to fuel their power reactors, entire planets carved into pieces to access their metal-rich cores—and watched a Dyson swarm’s power transmission system go mad and destroy any ship that entered its range.
“We have no illusions that these megastructures are safe for us,” Morgan concluded her thought aloud. “But the potential value of studying Precursor sites and artifacts is immense. In the past, such study would have been prevented by the Mesharom, and we are not entirely certain the Mesharom will stay in retreat if they learn the extent of our efforts out here.”
The Mesharom had once been slaves of the Precursors. Now they were the galaxy’s preeminent race, the “wise elders” among the Core Powers that the A!Tol Imperium was not yet able to challenge. Losses in the Arjtal campaign had gutted the forces the Mesharom had available to project power outside their borders, and they had been missing from the Imperium’s space for a decade now.
“We did successfully locate a Precursor facility about three long-cycles ago, and the Imperial Archeology Institute convened a special team of archeologists who have studied Precursor artifacts and are read in on everything we know about the Precursors.
“Speaker Susskind has confirmed IDs on our new passengers,” Morgan confirmed for her two senior officers. “All of them are members of that team. None are senior scientists, and we’re looking at about a third of the dig team.
“There are still a hundred people, ranging from A!Tol to human, out there somewhere. Potentially, some of them were on Alpha, though it looks like we intercepted them before they could transship anything…or anyone. I’m waiting for confirmation from home whether the dig site is still in communication with anyone.”
“If a third of the people from the site are currently in our guest quarters, it can’t be, can it?” Rogers asked.
“A lot of people, even military people, will say what they’re told with a gun to their head,” Vichy noted. The French Marine looked thoughtful. “These pirates could potentially keep the site on the air to avoid suspicion. That might even explain why we only have junior members here.”
“I’d love to know what they were planning on doing with them,” Morgan said. “The unquestioned good news out of the Kanzi’s little civil war is that the slave market is finally dead.”
“Mostly dead,” Rogers said grimly. “It’s underground even in the Theocracy now, but let’s not assume that assholes stopped being assholes just because one blue-furred priestess told them to behave.”
“Or that all assholes have blue fur,” Morgan conceded. “Any luck on the interrogations?”
“Nothing so far,” her First Sword admitted. “My training on this is pretty rusty, sir, and we’ve confirmed they’ve been immunized against most of the standard Imperial chemical interrogation tools.”
“Does that seem odd to anyone else?” Vichy asked. “Pirates don’t normally have access to that kind of gear.”
“My stepmother managed to buy advanced weapons technology on the black market once,” Morgan reminded them. “Tortuga won’t deal in slaves anymore, so far as I understand, but they’re still host to a thriving black market.”
Tortuga was a massive mobile space station belonging to an exiled faction of Laians, the closest Core Power to Imperial space. Exiles from those exiles had settled on Earth and become productive members of the Imperium, but the black-market shipyard refused to come in from the cold as an organized entity.
“That still speaks to a level of resources I wouldn’t expect two random pirate ships on the edge of nowhere to have, n’est-ce pas?” the Marine asked. “I accept that much is available if the money exists, but this does not suggest an organization with that kind of money.”
“Unless we are simply seeing a tiny portion of that organization,” Rogers countered slowly. “They blew up their own ship and, from your own reports, fought suicidally to defend the one you boarded.”
“A ship which I must presume did not have a nuclear suicide charge,” Vichy admitted. “Or that we were beyond reasonably lucky.”
Nguyen had been far more precise in disabling her target than the Marines had been with theirs. There’d been a lot more holes in the ship they’d captured, and Morgan agreed with Vichy’s assessment: they had quite possibly accidentally shot the suicide charge.
“I have to assume we’re looking at the tip of the iceberg,” Morgan told her people. “Potentially even someone who knew we were trying to carry out a covert research expedition out here. We’re a long way out from anywhere, on a daisy chain of hyperfold transmitters that only exists because we knew the Precursors had a cluster of installations out here.
“Our closest support is at Kosha—and we are Echelon Lord Davor’s heavy firepower,” she reminded them. The Ivida flag officer based her operations on the mixed civilian-Imperial resupply facility in orbit of Kosha’s fledgling colony, leaving her Captains to deploy independently.
Kosha was also sixteen light-years and two hyperfold relay stations behind them and didn’t even have a starcom of their own.
“How far are we from the dig site itself?” Vichy asked. “I am guessing it is between us and Kosha?”
“No.” Morgan shook her head and gestured a map into existence. “About the same distance from Kosha, with a slightly longer travel time due to the densities. We’re six light-years away, three cycles or so, given local hyperspace. Anyone leaving from Kosha would be at least seven or eight cycles.”
“They’d only be nine cycles if they came here and swung around,” Rogers observed as she looked at the map and the blinking light of the dig site system. “I’ve seen worse hyperspace densities, but that’s still a barrier.”
“As of my last messages from Kosha, the Echelon Lord has two destroyers on station,” Morgan told them. “I don’t see a point in calling for reinforcements that can’t make a difference.”
She smiled as the decision became obvious.
“We can’t haul the pirate ship with us, so we’ll take a few hours to empty her cargo bays of the artifacts. We’ll flag the location to Echelon Lord Davor for further investigation, and we will move to K-Seven-Seven-D-L-K-Six to investigate the fate of the dig site.
“Battalion Commander Vichy, we will almost certainly need to make a forced landing of a captured Imperial facility,” she told the Marine. “We need the archeological crew alive. I’d like prisoners from their captors, but preserving our people is the priority. Can you do that?”
“Pas impossible, mais difficile,” he replied. She glared at him. She didn’t usually wear her translator earbuds aboard Defiance—and she wasn’t going to admit she understood French perfectly. “Not impossible but difficult,” he clarified.
“Make a plan,” she told him. “Depending on the vagaries of hyperspace, we’re looking at as little as two cycles en route. We’ll drop out of hyperspace about half a cycle out of D-L-K-Six to pick up our messages, but that’s it.”
“I wish we had more data on what we can expect for resistance,” Rogers said. “If it’s more light pirate ships, I’m not worried—but given some of what we’re hearing about the Kanzi Clans…”
“Whoever these people are, everyone we’ve seen so far has been Imperial,” Morgan pointed out. “Eleven different Imperial species, according to Vichy’s reports, but Imperial.”
Their prisoners were three Pibo and an Ivida. Morgan was half wishing she had a member of either species aboard.
“Given that breakdown, I don’t expect to see Kanzi out here.” She shrugged. “There are heavier ships that end up in pirate hands, but none of them are a match for Defiance. Duchess Bond smashed a pirate flee
t with a single cruiser with compressed-matter armor and Laian guns. My impression is that pirates haven’t upgraded much since then…and Tornado is a museum ship these days.
“We’ll handle anything that hits us in space. I’m more concerned about getting our people off the ground intact.”
“Leave it to the Marines, sir,” Vichy promised. “If we have any details on the ground site in the Lost Dragon files that I can use for unclassified training, it will make my life easier, but I will work with whatever I get.”
Morgan nodded and ordered her system to disgorge a data chip.
“This goes on your personal device while severed from the ship network only,” she warned him.
“Not my first Dragon Protocol, ma capitaine,” the Marine told her calmly as he took it.
That raised a mental eyebrow for Morgan. She hadn’t known that her Marine CO had been involved in that kind of situation before. Dragon Protocols, after all, were reserved for the things the Imperium was hiding from the Core Powers.
Chapter Six
“I fully validate your decision to read Battalion Commander Vichy in on Lost Dragon,” the recorded image told her. Echelon Lord Davor was a tall humanoid with dark-red skin and double-jointed limbs. Like all Ivida, her face was motionless and hairless—the race had never evolved the complex array of facial muscles of most humanoids.
“I am explicitly authorizing you to read in as many of your officers as necessary, presuming you follow proper protocol for doing so,” Davor continued. “The D-L-K-Six dig site does not report in to me, but I had an agreement with !Lat that he would advise me of any problems they encountered and check in every five-cycle.
“My last report from !Lat was sent only a cycle before your report from D-N-E-Five. I do not assess any reasonable possibility that the Lost Dragon site lost a third of its team and had them moved to D-N-E-Five in a single cycle, so either !Lat is being held prisoner or is part of whatever is going on.”
Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) Page 4