Veil of Shadows (Book 2 of The Empire of Bones Saga)

by Terry Mixon

“Yeah, maybe so. But give a guy a little warning, will you?”

  The marines had already forced the lift doors open, so she followed them out. This level was just as shoddy as the one above. The floors weren’t exactly level and there was no paint anywhere. Just enough bare functionality to get by.

  Kelsey scanned the area around them. Most of the information didn’t mean anything to her, but the suit reported a large area directly in front of the lift as shielded. She couldn’t detect anything but a blank spot in her readings.

  “Lieutenant Reese, there’s something ahead of us. I’m sensing a very large shielded area about seventy-five meters ahead.”

  “I don’t see anything. Are you certain?”

  “I’m positive.”

  Reese ordered his men to move forward. He gestured for Talbot to stay back with her.

  She wasn’t the least bit offended. She’d been in one firefight and wasn’t eager to repeat the experience. She nervously eyed her readouts as they moved into the shielded area. Nothing looked different about the corridor around them, but now her scanners couldn’t detect anything. Not even the bulkhead right next to her.

  One of the marines up front reported an armored hatch. Reese ordered a halt while they planted charges to breach it.

  “Maybe I can open it,” she said. “Let me take a look.”

  Reese reluctantly agreed. She made her way through the marines until she stood in front of the hatch.

  “If you open it, just step aside, and let us go in first,” Talbot said.

  Kelsey nodded and felt for an interface with the door. She found one, but it was different from any that she’d accessed before. It felt…stupid. It didn’t respond to a query for information, and only seemed to have the option of open or closed. Perhaps that was all the Pale Ones were capable of telling the hatch to do.

  She sent at a command to open and the hatch slid to the side. The room beyond was dark, but she didn’t need to see to know what was there. The scanner shielding didn’t obscure the inside of the compartment. Dozens of threat icons popped up in her mind’s eye. Unbelievably, some of them registered as wielding advanced weaponry, and she instinctively knew that the Pale Ones were targeting the marines.

  “Ambush!” Her automated reflexes didn’t care what Reese had ordered her to do. They threw her through the hatch and off to the side, out of the deathtrap the corridor was about to become in the face of old Empire weapons. She sent the mental command for the hatch to close even before she started moving. Reese and Talbot were going to be furious, but it beat them being dead.

  The world was already slowing as she brought up her rifle and swept across the Pale Ones, the combat drugs taking effect. The light stroke of the trigger she gave the rifle sent a stream of hypervelocity flechettes into the unarmored savages. The darts shredded them, just like the simulated targets on the firing range. She kept moving under the assumption they’d focus their fire on her.

  The shots they sent towards the marines in the hall struck the hatch as it slammed closed, blowing large divots in the metal. It wasn’t going to open very easily now. She staggered and fell when one of the flechettes struck her shoulder, but the armor held.

  Kelsey knew that the Pale Ones could see in the dark just as well as she could, so she rolled behind a large piece of equipment. She had no idea what it was, but it was bulky enough to stand up to fire for a few seconds. She retrieved the scanner remote she’d put in her pouch and threw it out into the center of the compartment.

  The manual she’d found for it said that she’d be able to use the remote to fire without exposing herself, but she was nowhere near that good yet. Instead, she noted where the largest concentration of the enemy was and threw a grenade. When it went off, it was as though the world had ended.

  She’d never experienced such a tremendous shockwave of light, noise, and pressure. The commando suit protected her from most of it, but not all. The remote reported more than half of the ambushers as obliterated or down.

  Kelsey popped up while they were stunned and opened fire. She killed several of them before diving behind fresh cover. Only half a dozen of them were still alive, scattered around the room. Being able to see them from relative safety, she was able to pick them off one by one until she was alone again. They managed to hit her two more times: once in the leg and once on the side of her helmet. That last shot stunned her, but her implants and pharmacology unit kept her on her feet.

  She staggered to her feet and made a sweep of the compartment, verifying there were no more hostiles. There weren’t. The Pale Ones were dead.

  Reese and Talbot had been trying to contact her continuously since the firefight started, but she hadn’t been able to answer them. Well, she didn’t have enough attention to spare for them. She supposed that a real marine could do both those things and more all at the same time.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “They’re all down. Let me see if I can get this door open.” She sent it a command to the hatch to open. It not only failed to open, she couldn’t sense it anymore. “It’s not responding. It must’ve been damaged in the firefight.”

  “Get back,” Reese snarled. “We’re going to blow the hatch. Like we should have in the first place.”

  Oh, yeah. She was in big trouble.

  The explosives they set off warped the hatch even further, but didn’t open it. Neither did the second set. That caused Lieutenant Reese to curse a lot more. Somehow, she didn’t think his failure was putting her in a better position when he got his hands on her.

  “Go back to the lift,” she said. “I’m going to blow the hatch from inside.”

  She retreated to the rear of the compartment, took cover, and brought the plasma rifle off her back. She trained it on the hatch, and when Reese reported he was clear, pulled the trigger. The resulting explosion blew the armored hatch into molten fragments. It did the same for the first ten meters of the corridor, leaving a gaping concave area of pure rock and melted metal in its wake.

  Kelsey whistled. The armor-grade plasma rifle was significantly more powerful than the regular handheld version. Just like her flechette rifle was vastly more capable than its smaller brethren, managing to accelerate the tungsten alloy darts up to 5,000 meters a second. All it took was one glance around the room at the shredded bodies and divots blown into the walls to imagine how effective and terrifying full-scale combat would’ve been in the old Empire.

  The marines had to wait for the corridor to cool before they came in, which caused Lieutenant Reese’s temper to fray further. When he ordered his men in, she stood there with her arms out so they wouldn’t mistake her for a threat.

  Reese stormed over to her. “That was the most irresponsible, fool-headed stunt I’ve ever seen in my life. What the hell were you thinking?”

  He held up his hand before she could respond. “On second thought, I don’t want to know. Whatever it was, it was wrong. I thought I was crystal clear that you were not to put yourself into danger. Did I stutter?”

  “No, Lieutenant. But I didn’t have a choice. There were dozens of them with a clear line of fire straight down that corridor. Those flechettes would’ve blown your armor to pieces. I had to distract them and get that hatch closed before they killed all of us. Tell me you would’ve done something differently.”

  Reese began cursing. He sounded a lot like Jared did when she upset him. She seemed to have that effect on men. Perhaps it was a character flaw.

  “I’ve got something over here,” Lieutenant Phelps said. “It looks like a computer of some kind.”

  The marine officer glared at Kelsey. “This isn’t over yet. You stand right here beside me and you don’t fart unless I tell you to. Am I clear?”

  “Perfectly clear, Lieutenant.”

  Talbot held up four fingers and tapped the side of his head as his lieutenant stormed off. Kelsey switched to channel four.

  “I can see why you did what you did, but you’ve pushed him too far.”

  “There were going to kil
l all of you. My armor might’ve survived the opening salvo, but yours wouldn’t survive one hit.”

  The older man sighed. “I’m going to have to volunteer for these implants just to keep up with you. I’m too old for this crap.”

  Kelsey caught up to Reese. The computer they’d found seemed a bit substantial for just controlling an asteroid. It actually filled an entirely separate room behind the area where the fight had taken place.

  Phelps shone a light over the compartment. “This has been here a while. The consoles have dust on them. A lot of dust. I don’t know what this thing is, but it’s not here just to control those thruster units.”

  Reese turned to her. “If you try to interface with that thing, is it going to attack you?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. They need me in a special machine with physical contact to override the programming inside my implants. It may not do what I tell it to, but I should be safe enough.”

  “Do it. See if that’s the computer controlling the thrusters.”

  Kelsey initiated contact with the computer and immediately discovered that it was almost completely inactive. Only three processors were running with limited resources. Many thousands of other processors were offline. A quick check confirmed that virtually all the data storage was empty.

  “I think that it’s controlling the grav drives, but it’s almost completely turned off. Only one small part of it is functional.”

  “Can you alter its course?” Phelps asked.

  She asked the computer its course and a schematic popped up in her mind’s eye. “I think so. Ensign Cruz, it has a mountain range on the planet targeted. What do I do?”

  The woman looked into the room uncertainly. “Without seeing the controls, I don’t know if I can tell you exactly what to do. Can you enable the console over here?”

  Kelsey sent a command through the system to display the asteroid’s course and the console beside the pilot came to life. She stepped over to watch what the Ensign did.

  The console showed the planet and the asteroid. A solid green line connected them. Cruz tapped the controls and the course moved until it just missed the planet. The green line changed to yellow a short distance away from the planet. When the Ensign moved it further away from the planet, it went to red. She edged it back to yellow.

  “We caught it just in time. Much longer and I don’t think we could have generated a miss. We’ve saved the planet.”

  “Good,” Reese said. “Talbot, take the Princess back to the pinnace with your team. Tell the pilot to take her back to Courageous right now. I’m not taking any more chances with her.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jared couldn’t blame Kelsey for the events on the asteroid, but he wasn’t going to take any chances with her going forward. If he’d been thinking clearly the first time, she would’ve been in a follow-up group. Though that likely meant the marines wouldn’t have been able to clear the asteroid. As it was, she’d undoubtedly saved many lives. When her father found out the events she’d been through, Jared would be lucky to command a sailboat.

  The asteroid was going to pass uncomfortably close to the planet, but with something that massive, it wasn’t possible to change course on a dime. Still, a miss was a miss. They’d foiled the Pale Ones again.

  Courageous detected no operational ships near the shipyards, making the facilities look abandoned. If that were true, then salvaging the yards would be very useful. Not only for the data on the ship construction used by the Pale Ones, but perhaps in putting them to use by the Pentagarans.

  Would the Pale Ones have booby-trapped them? It hardly seemed likely that they would attempt to destroy the planet and leave the shipyards ripe for the plucking. That meant more boarding parties. More fighting. They’d been lucky so far this time, but that could change in a moment.

  He considered the complexity of the situation. The probes near the planet could be re-tasked to do active scans on the shipyards. Jared knew those shipyards had weapons, so he had every expectation that the shipyards would promptly destroy the probes. But perhaps before they died, they could give them some useful information.

  He looked up from his console. “Zia. I want you to take two of the three probes that we sent to the planet, move them in as close as practical to the shipyards, and do an active scan. I want to know everything you can tell me about them and I want to see what their response is to the activity.”

  “Aye, sir.” She manipulated her controls and they waited as the speed of light signals traveled to the probes. Time dragged until the responses came.

  “Both probes have been destroyed, Captain, but I got detailed readings on both shipyards. It looks like we significantly damaged the one we fired on last month. Many areas of the habitat portion are open to space. I would judge it unlikely that it has any live Pale Ones aboard. Also, I only detected no operational weapons on that structure.”

  Jared had already been going over the data and concurred with everything that she’d said. They could take out the operational shipyard, but they’d virtually destroy it in the process. The damaged shipyard seemed unarmed. As long as it didn’t self-destruct, of course.

  “Pasco, keep the planet between us and the shipyards as much as you can. Bring us close to the damaged shipyard. Use it to shield us from the operational shipyard.”

  They came in hard and fast. His worry that the shipyard would self-destruct once they moved in proved unfounded. It simply sat there.

  The boarding proved to be somewhat anticlimactic, as well. Most of the systems appear to be off-line and bloated corpses filled the corridors. The EMP effects of the fusion weapon must’ve completely crippled the shipyard. The scientists would have a field day tearing it apart looking for clues about the Pale Ones.

  Once assured of their relative safety, Jared put Courageous into orbit around the planet just behind the shipyard, carefully keeping an eye on the operational shipyard through several drones used to relay signals.

  He’d worried the operational shipyard would fire at them around the curve of the planet, but it didn’t. Perhaps the primitive missiles they had weren’t capable of targeting when the launching vessel couldn’t see the target.

  In any case, Courageous seemed to be safe for the moment. That might not last, so he ordered Zia to scan the surface. Almost immediately, she detected the remains of old Empire civilization. Bombed out cities and ancient ruins.

  He still had no idea why the rebels would devastate Erorsi and leave Pentagar completely alone. It made no sense. The asteroid had targeted at a mountain range. There didn’t seem to be anything special about that area, so he had no idea why they picked it. Perhaps it was just a convenient target for the massive weapon.

  Relatively certain that they were safe for the moment, Jared canceled battle stations and just kept the ship at a heightened state of alert. When commander Graves arrived from operations, he turned the watch over to him. “Call me immediately if the tactical situation changes. I’m going to debrief the marines.”

  His XO gave him a knowing look. “You mean you’re going to debrief Princess Kelsey. Go easy on her. I understand that the combat was pretty extreme. Even worse than the Parliament building.”

  Jared slowly nodded. “I’m going to have to rein her in somehow, but I’m not going to make a huge production of it. This is partly my fault. I shouldn’t have sent her along with the marines. Not until that base had been cleared.”

  He entered the lift and instructed it to take him to marine country. By the time he arrived, he’d decided on a basic strategy.

  Activity filled marine country. Some of the marines were cleaning equipment while others were preparing for combat operations. A distracted-looking Lieutenant Reese broke off his conversation with some Pentagaran marines and came over to him. “Captain. If you’ll step in my office, I’ll give you a brief report on the operations to date.”

  Jared hadn’t been to Lieutenant Reese’s new office before. It was as large as Jared’s o
ld office had been on Athena. Several citation plaques hung on the wall behind the desk and a shelf held some sports trophies. Baseball, it looked like. Jared had never been a follower of the sport, but it was very popular throughout the Empire.

  He gestured for the marine to take a seat behind the desk while he sat at one of the visitor’s chairs.

  The marine officer remained standing at attention. “I take full responsibility for the danger I put Princess Kelsey into. It was reckless and unacceptable. I have no excuse for my lapse.”

  Jared laughed before he could stop himself. “That is a complete load of horse shit and we both know it. Princess Kelsey does things that no sane human being would even think about doing. I’m certain that you took what would normally be adequate protective measures. And sit down. You’re wearing me out standing there.”

  When the marine sat, Jared continued. “What happened on that asteroid?”

  He listened intently as Lieutenant Reese walked through the events of the assault. When the marine finished, Jared stared at the bulkhead for a minute thinking. “The idea of Pale Ones using old Empire weapons is very disturbing to me. That has all kinds of unpleasant implications.”

  Reese nodded. “I hadn’t believed that they were capable of using them, but I suppose if they can fly a spaceship, they can shoot a gun. I’d wager that they required some special control in order to do so, or some special instructions. Based on what Kelsey saw, they weren’t very accurate. If we’d already been inside that room, I think we could’ve taken them.”

  Jared tried to imagine the fight. “Kelsey taking them out all by herself is a different kind of disturbing. I’ve seen her fight hand-to-hand and it’s amazing and terrifying. I can only imagine what her using old Empire weapons looked like. Just how effective were the weapons they were using?”

  “Let’s put it this way, our shaped charges couldn’t breach that armored door. Princess Kelsey’s plasma rifle did this.” He brought up a series of images on the console. “One shot.”

  The destruction made Jared’s jaw drop. “That’s…unimaginable.”