by Terry Mixon
“No.”
“You might as well pull up a chair. This is going to take a while.”
Once the women had seated themselves, he continued. “One of the first things that we discovered when we explored the old Empire was that there was a different kind of flip point. One that was extremely difficult to detect but led to places that we’d never visited before.
“We’ve utilized one of them to get to a place that is safe for the moment. However, we believe that these new flip points have a special property that potentially allows for transit to multiple destinations, depending on the specific frequency of the output.”
He gestured toward the disassembled parts. “Someone utilized this flip drive to do exactly that. We have to figure out how they did it and where they went from here.”
“I’m not a flip-point physicist, but what you’re saying is impossible.”
Carl grinned. “Not really. In fact, we’re going to send some probes through to verify the theory very shortly. Let me explain this in more detail. Get ready to have your mind blown.”
Annette sat back and listened as he began explaining the physics behind the weak flip points to the disbelieving scientist. While much of the explanation was going to fly far over her head, she was pleased to see that the two were already working together. This was going to work out.
Talbot escorted a civilian survey team from the Dresden orbital down to the surface of the planet. To keep things simple, he chose a large island a good distance from where the other prisoners lived. Perhaps “prisoners” was the wrong term. “Unwilling colonists” might be more appropriate.
Since he was feeling a bit puckish, he dubbed the island Atlantis. After all, it was going to be the home of the high-tech civilization among the primitives.
The civilians doing the survey were a surly lot. He couldn’t blame them. They were completely uprooting these people and stranding them on an unknown world. Likely for the rest of their lives.
Considering what the Rebel Empire stood for, his sympathy was limited. If his side won this war, they’d come back and relocate these people. If they didn’t win, well, at least they’d survive.
Once he had the construction people surveying the island to find a location for their new home, he set out to get detailed scans of the entire island and its surroundings. He’d chosen a large harbor as the primary city location for Atlantis. That way, when they built oceangoing vessels, it would be handy.
Commodore Anderson had ordered him to get decent scans of every island within striking distance of Atlantis. Other teams were busy scanning all the other potentially habitable landmasses. They wanted to be sure that they knew the location of every single group of colonists. It wouldn’t do to have some folks isolated and left to suffer.
It only took a few hours for something to pop up as unusual. They were flying over a moderately sized landmass centered on an extinct or dormant volcano when the scanners read something artificial. This place was far away from where any other colonists had been located, so he was curious.
Talbot ordered the pilot to bring them around for a closer pass. The target was camouflaged fairly well.
Sitting along the western side of the island were the remains of a moderately large town. The vegetation had encroached completely into the area, making it look like a wilderness. He could see why he hadn’t seen it from orbit.
He zoomed the scanner in and examined one of the buildings. It was roughly done, but obviously made of modern materials. Imperial materials. The style was also one he was moderately familiar with from his time on Harrison’s World. He’d seen similar structures when visiting some of the small towns.
“Find us a good place to land near that town,” Talbot instructed the pilot.
“Aye, sir.”
The cutter pilot brought them down into a clearing about half a kilometer away from the ruined town.
Talbot knew that he should probably let someone know where he was going, but he wanted to take a good look at the place first. No one had occupied this place for a very long time, so it should be relatively safe.
He dug out some unpowered armor from one of the storage bins and verified that he had plenty of flechettes for the pistol he always carried. Just to be safe, he grabbed the flechette rifle kept with the armor. He doubted there were any wild animals that could hurt him, based on their previous scans of the planet, but he’d play it safe.
“Take the cutter back up over the town and circle around,” he told the pilot. “I’ll stay in communication with you every ten minutes. If you can’t get ahold of me, call for backup.”
He exited the cutter and headed toward the town. The vegetation he was crossing through was very similar to what he’d found on the other islands. All of the separate landmasses must’ve been connected at one point. Everything was too homogenous to have developed separately.
With the rough terrain, it took him about twenty minutes to get to the outskirts of the town. Some buildings were made of plascrete, though roughly done. Barring serious damage, they’d last a long, long time.
Not all the buildings around him were that sturdy, though. Many of them were made of local materials and had collapsed. He could see trees growing out of what had once been buildings made of wood or stone.
Talbot resisted the urge to go inside any of them. He’d save that for the larger ones near the center of town.
Large was a relative term. The tallest structure looked to be about eight or nine stories. Maybe ten, at most. It was also made of plascrete, but someone had taken the time to make it actually look good.
Even after all this time, the walls were still bright white, and he could see inlaid pieces in the plascrete that gave it darker accents. It looked very sleek and completely out of place in this wilderness.
The doors leading into the front of the building were closed but not locked. With his pistol in hand, he cautiously went inside. The bottom floor appeared to be mainly a large lobby. A wide desk with places for half a dozen people stood in front of the bank of elevators.
The wall behind the desk had the Fleet emblem across its entire width, with the almost-unnecessary words below it: Fleet Headquarters.
It seems he’d found where the ghosts had set up shop after they’d fled through the weak flip point.
16
Raul Castille looked around to see if anyone was sitting close enough to overhear what he was about to say to Veronica. Realistically, he knew that the enemy could be monitoring them closely, but the other diners were making enough noise to perhaps shield what he was about to say.
“I think I’ve come up with an escape plan.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Where would we go? Are you planning to steal one of the flip-capable warships? That seems a little bit of a stretch.”
“No. I’m smart enough to realize we don’t have the manpower or access for something like that. I’m talking about hiding until these people are gone. They’re not going to stay here in this system forever. Once they’ve left, the Empire will eventually come and find us.”
The woman gave him a look that said she was not convinced. “I’m not sure that’s the best idea. In fact, I’m not sure of anything at this point.”
He frowned. “What does that mean?”
She gestured at the people around them. “My people and I have been doing research on what they say happened during the revolution. I went into that project with the full expectation that we’d quickly find the forgeries. Now, I’m not so sure.”
“Of course they’re feeding us lies,” he said derisively. “You can’t possibly believe that fiction they’re spouting. That the lords have enslaved us? You are a Fleet officer. You should know better.”
“We’ve done a lot of reading,” she said quietly. “Their library of books is quite extensive. I’m talking exabytes of data. It can’t all be faked. Looking back at the time of the revolution, none of what they have indicates anything like what they taught us in history class.”
Raul
rubbed his forehead. “I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. How could you possibly believe anything you’re reading?”
She shrugged. “One of my officers picked a few books that he’d read before. Heirlooms handed down through his family since the revolution. Actual, physical books.
“He was only passingly familiar with a few of them, but some he knew by heart. There’s no way these people could know which books to leave in the same condition as what my officer had read. None.”
“And you’re saying that these books your officer knew were precisely as he remembered? Please. No one has that good of a memory.”
“His memory is pretty good. If he says that he can’t find anything in that particular volume that looks different, I believe him. If one book is accurate, I have to wonder how many others are.”
He shook his head strongly. “That kind of talk is treason. I suggest for your own well-being that you reconsider what you’re saying.”
“Don’t be an idiot. I’m not disloyal to the Empire. The problem is that I’m not a rubber-stamping yes woman, either. If we ever hope to understand who these people really are, we have to understand our own history, and we need to be sure that it’s true. At this point, I’m not convinced it is.”
He stared at her coolly. “So you’re saying that you have no intention of trying to escape with me?”
“That’s not what I’m saying at all. We have a duty to escape. If you have a plan with a reasonable chance of success, I’ll do whatever I can to make it happen.”
He relaxed a little. He hadn’t realized he’d tensed up. “Good. Good. I’ve overheard a number of people talking about the planet we’re orbiting. Apparently, it’s where the ghosts have been keeping the people they’ve captured during their raids. Mostly the higher orders.
“They’ve also located the island used by the ghosts before they departed this world. Details are sketchy about both groups, but if we can escape to the surface of the planet, we can hide among the people that are already down there. They will help us.
“Eventually, someone will come looking. When that happens, we can all get off this planet and take the knowledge we’ve gained with us. The lords need to know what we’ve found out about these people.”
Her eyes turned toward the guards leaning against the wall. “How do you intend to get past our armed watchers?”
He smiled. “That’s all a matter of timing. You see, my guards keep watch on me, and your guards keep watch on you. They’re not working as a concerted whole, but as two separate entities. We can use that lack of communication to our advantage.”
“Sounds tricky. As soon as we attack, alarms will go off throughout the ship. How are we going to get to the docking bay, steal a cutter, dodge the fighters these people have, and land on a planet without them knowing where we’ve gone?”
“That sounds like defeatism. You need to trust that we’re going to have some luck fall our way.”
She grunted. “The problem with luck is that it comes in two flavors: good and bad. I’m certain we’re going to have some kind of luck. I just suspect some of it is not going to be the kind we want. How do you want to do this?”
“Here’s what I have in mind…”
Kelsey looked around the massive lobby with amazement. “How in the world did people running for their lives build something like this?”
Talbot shrugged. “I have no idea. They had the liner with them, so they might have had some skilled construction people they could tap. Maybe even some equipment. Or they could have built this place a hundred years later.
“I’ve had my people sweep the building from top to bottom. The previous occupants stripped all the computers out. We haven’t found a single electronic device of any kind. Nothing with any writing at all. Someone scrubbed this building.”
“Surely they couldn’t have done that to the whole town.”
“You might be surprised. We selected a few buildings at random and turned up very similar results. The town appears as though they abandoned it in a very orderly fashion.
“They swept it from one end to the other looking for anything they’d missed. If it were me, I’d have had multiple teams. One group to sweep behind the first. Perhaps even a third.”
“It’s not very helpful,” she said sourly. “This is obviously where the survivors from Fleet set up shop. The thing is, I’m not really sure why. They had their ships. They’re obviously using them to harass the Rebel Empire. This world is okay, but why pick it?”
“I’m going to bet it took time for them to figure out how to use the weak flip points,” Talbot said. “If they didn’t have someone like Carl along, it might have taken them years to grasp what they were dealing with. Fleet engineers are pretty bright people, but there are limits to what they can do.
“If I had to wager a guess, they used the liner to test out their first-generation flip modulator. It failed spectacularly. That would make them slow down.”
That made sense. If they didn’t have someone to work out the theory, it might have taken them decades to work it out. That more than explained the town they were standing in.
“Well, we need to be thorough,” she said. “I want you and your people to search every building that seems safe to enter. Leave no stone unturned. Pick a few that aren’t safe and see about having the engineers help move the rubble. Perhaps something was left there.”
“I’m not holding out too much hope,” he said. “These people were pretty damned thorough.”
Once he’d left, Kelsey stared up at the Fleet emblem on the wall. What must it have been like for those people? They’d obviously fled during the height of the rebellion. This place must’ve seemed like a godsend. No pursuit and a chance to live out their lives in peace.
But at some point, they’d made the discovery they could use the weak flip point to travel to other systems. Ones not occupied by the Rebel Empire.
They’d relocated. From the rumors that she’d heard, these people attacked the Rebel Empire where they could and then vanished as if they had never been.
It had to drive the AIs nuts.
They’d undoubtedly lost ships along the way. They’d probably never had very many to begin with. If she had to guess, the ghosts probably came from a single task group assigned to escort the liner, and perhaps a few other vessels they’d picked up along the way.
She imagined that the discovery of multiple destinations through the weak flip points had inspired them to move on and then to use them to attack their enemies. Guerrilla warfare.
Now they lurked in the dark, striking out at their enemies from the shadows, and then vanishing without a trace. No wonder the Rebel Empire called them ghosts. The supernatural overtones were almost inevitable.
It fell to her and her people to find out where these descendants of loyalists lived now. They’d obviously decided to use the first world they’d discovered to house the prisoners they’d captured. The ones they didn’t like anyway. That meant they’d found more desirable worlds that they lived on now.
They took the lower orders elsewhere. Hypothetically, there were probably several other strata to the society that had formed around these ghosts.
Based on this building, Fleet service might be one of them. Certainly, it had to be important to them. Even more important than it had been for the Old Empire. Fleet was all that stood between them and death.
Kelsey sighed. This wasn’t getting them any closer to solving the mysteries. If they were going to find a way to track these ghosts, then it was going to fall to Carl and his people. There were obviously more destinations to be discovered using the weak flip point. Her friend just needed to find them.
She supposed she needed to stop using the phrase “weak flip point.” Carl had been tossing around a new name. Multiflip point. That was a hell of a lot more descriptive, so it was time for her to endorse its use. She’d spread the word once she got back into orbit.
Finding this town had excited her so much. She’
d figured that they could finally get answers to some of her questions. Yet the people they were following had proved cautious and thorough. It was going to take a lot more work to track them down.
Once she did, then the delicate dance would begin. These people had no reason to trust anyone. They’d been at war for five hundred years. It would be all too easy for them to assume that her task group was a Rebel Empire unit and attack.
Whenever they found these people, she was going to need to proceed very, very carefully. They needed allies, not more enemies.
These ghosts had absolutely no reason to trust her people. She needed to come up with a reason why they should. So far, that had eluded her.
After taking one last look at the wall, Kelsey headed toward her cutter. It was time to get back to work.
17
Even after thinking about Castille’s plan overnight, Veronica still thought he was insane, but she really didn’t have a choice. He was a security officer. If she didn’t follow his instructions, the end result would not be pretty. Once the lords found them again—which they would—it would be the end of her. Perhaps literally.
Timing was going to be key in making this work. If the two of them were not precisely where they needed to be at exactly the right moment, it couldn’t happen.
Thankfully, cranial implants made keeping precise time a simple task. She gathered her officers and informed their guards they were going to eat lunch as a group.
Even with the larger number of prisoners, the two guards still felt they had control of the situation with their stunners. They followed along somewhat behind Veronica and her officers to keep them at a safe distance.
On a ship of this size, with as many people as were around them, that would normally be perfectly adequate. Unfortunately for them, Raul Castille had taken this behavior into account. At a predetermined cross corridor, he stepped out at just the right moment to surprise her guards.