The Empress had more emotional control than Annette had ever seen in another A!Tol. Her dull-gray skin barely flushed in response to that—but the Duchess picked out the orange of anger and the black of fear in the quickly suppressed flush.
“The Fleet Lords warned of this,” she finally said. “They feared that your giving them a home would cause problems.”
“I know.”
“Do you expect me then, Duchess Bond, to turn the tides of history?” A!Shall asked calmly. “Do you expect me to allow the fears of my strong right hands to force me to step aside? To break the oaths I swore to you?”
“I fear for my people,” Annette admitted. There was almost no one else in the galaxy she would admit that to. “And my children.”
A!Shall flashed bright blue: an understanding nod. The Empress of the A!Tol would never have children. To stave off the birthing madness that killed all females of her kind, the Empress’s eggs were extracted and destroyed. It would be a child of one of her sisters who would assume the throne when A!Shall passed on.
“I will not defy the waves of a thousand thousand long-cycles,” the Empress proclaimed. “I will not break the oaths and sacred tablets that make your Duchy mine. I will speak to the Lords of my Fleets and Armies.
“I do not know, Annette Bond, what force we may send to your aid. But know this: the Imperium is one. Unified. An attack on any of us is an attack on all of us.
“And while your Laians may still call themselves Exiles, they are not. They are my citizens, and the tentacle of my Imperium stands above them.
“Negotiate if you can, Duchess Bond. Send all that you have seen to my warriors. But know you speak not just for one world but for two hundred—and that I have faith in your honor.”
Annette felt her spine straighten as A!Shall spoke. Across cultures, across species, the Empress still managed to hit every button to give her strength. It wasn’t hard, sometimes, to see why A!Shall was Empress despite her age.
“I will do what I can,” she promised. “But thank you.”
“I swore an oath to you as you swore an oath to me,” the Empress replied. “We will both keep our oaths. That is how the Imperium is built, after all!”
#
Annette’s Council was waiting for her and she walked into the room calmly. After four years together, she knew which way many of them would jump, but their skills, their advice, were worth their weight in gold.
“Your Grace, how are you feeling?” Dr. An Sirkit asked. The Thai princess—now a purely ceremonial title—was also Annette’s Councilor for Health Affairs, charged with implementing Imperial medical technology across the world.
“There is a dreadnought orbiting within weapons range of our world and demanding that we surrender citizens who joined us of their own free will,” Annette replied. “That is the focus of my energies, Doctor!”
“You are also pregnant,” Sirkit said. “Even with our medical technology, twins at your age requires…caution.”
“I am perfectly cautious,” Annette snapped. “I also have a job to do, Doctor. Let’s focus, shall we?”
The half-dozen others in the room had known better than to say anything. Elon and Zhao sat at her left and right hands as Annette took her chair. Karl Lebrand, still one of America’s richest men despite it all being in blind trusts now, sat past Elon, facing Janice Philips, the dark-skinned woman who’d taken on the unenviable task of making sure that areas of the world neglected before the Annexation still benefited from the Imperium.
Pierre Larue, Councilor for European Affairs, sat at the end of the table with Hope Mandela, the Councilor for African Affairs. The two, a widower and a divorcee, had found a surprising middle-aged romance in their work together, and unless Annette missed her guess, they were holding hands under the table.
“Ladies, gentlemen, you have all reviewed the exchange between Pincer of the Republic Kandak and Admiral Villeneuve,” she told them. “We know what the Laian Republic wants from us. While this shouldn’t need to be said, I’m going to lay it out very clearly:
“Under no circumstances will we surrender our citizens, regardless of their species or origin. We have the full support of the Empress on this matter and should expect to see heavy firepower being relocated in our direction in short order.”
“Doesn’t that risk escalating the situation?” Lebrand asked.
“There isn’t much escalation from sailing a capital ship into a foreign nation and basically demanding our complete surrender,” Zhao snapped. “Any student of Chinese history can tell you that.”
That sent a chill running through the room.
“The Empress and I both agree how loyalty flows, people,” Annette said calmly into the silence. “The Laians came to us because we promised them a home, a safe harbor. We will not surrender our citizens. If that requires our Militia and the Imperial Navy to throw super-battleship squadrons at a Laian war-dreadnought, that is what will happen.”
“So, what do we do?” Mandela asked. “Until the Imperium can reinforce us, we negotiate from a position of weakness with someone who wants something from us.” The black South African woman glanced around the room. “As both Councilor Zhao and Councilor Sirkit can remind anyone who has forgotten, that hasn’t generally ended well in our own history.”
“Admiral Villeneuve has laid out our initial negotiating position,” Annette told them. “We are prepared to prove that our plasma-lance program did not use any stolen Laian technology. That is all we are going to give them.”
“Can we even prove that?” Philips asked. “I thought the Laians were involved in the development.”
“They were,” Elon confirmed, “but not in any major role. Orentel has been involved in other programs of ours, but the lance development project was as aboveboard as we could make it, because we knew this might be a problem.
“The base technology behind it was within the Imperium’s grasp; the A!Tol just hadn’t combined things in the right way. Knowing it was possible was half the battle; Orentel just told us when we were barking up the completely wrong tree.
“So, yes, Councilor Philips, we can prove that our plasma lance was entirely home-developed after seeing the Exiles’ weapon in action.”
“That might not be enough,” Annette warned, “but that is where we’re going to start. I’m not certain what concessions we can offer, but we will see. Once this ‘Pincer of the Republic’ is actually speaking to us, I will invite them to meet with myself and Admiral Villeneuve aboard one of the orbital stations.
“I would prefer a peaceful solution to this,” she said grimly. “I am all too aware of the potential costs of the alternative.”
#
Chapter 15
“I’m not seeing anything,” Harold admitted, looking out the window as the survey craft shot over the Corellian Plateau toward Wolastoq’s destination.
“It’s a fifty-thousand-year-old crash site,” the xenoarchaeologist pointed out. “What are you expecting to see? Debris? A crash furrow?”
“Something?” he replied, filing away the woman’s new grin and cheerfulness in the “not quite sure what’s going on” category in his mind. “You told me you’d found it, so…”
“Look at the scanners, Captain,” she told him. “We’re seeing a higher density of irradiated soil. They were closer to the ground here.”
A glance over her shoulder confirmed what she was saying. The radiation levels were still low, but they were high enough now that the survey craft, a glorified helicopter with added gravity controls for efficiency, could detect them from the air instead of needing the lab to go over them.
“This radiation is weird,” he noted, looking at the spectrographic data. “It’s not what I’d have expected to see from a crash site. Less decayed in many ways than I’d expect from fifty thousand years.”
“I know,” Wolastoq agreed. “The dating is solid, though. Weird, huh?”
“You sound far too excited,” he said.
She laughed.
“We’re about to poke at a spaceship that pre-dates known galactic civilization,” she told him. “You bet I’m excited. Come on, we’re coming in at what I think the final resting site.”
There were dozens of nondescript lumps across the Corellian Plateau’s surface. Rocks left behind by glaciers. Permafrost that had expanded under soil and refrozen at the higher level. There was nothing to make this particular lump of dirt and stone look unusual except for the calculations and maps that said the crash path ended there.
“Circle the mound,” Wolastoq ordered the pilot. “Drop the sensor pylons in the exact locations I gave you. Even the tiniest of errors will extend the calibration time.”
The mound was two hundred meters across, and the survey craft cut a three-hundred-meter-wide circle around it, dropping ten pylons for the xenoarchaeologist’s scanner array.
“All right, put us down; I’m running the calibration cycles.”
She was focused on the screen in front of her, a larger version of the scroll-handle flimsies the Militia used as communicators, as she ran through a series of tests and links. The survey chopper settled in to a gentle landing and she hummed softly to herself.
“And…there.”
Something clicked through on the screen, and the page of readouts and data resolved into a roughly three-dimensional map of the mound that Harold could follow. He couldn’t read the iconography—but then, he imagined Wolastoq would be lost trying to read a warship tactical plot—but he could see the rough outline of the ground.
And he could see that there was something there.
“Calibrating pulses. All right.” The xenoarchaeologist was talking more to herself than to him, but he waited patiently. Watching her work was fascinating in its own right.
“Lot of rock, lot of ice. The material we’ve been finding—it’s weird, doesn’t always show as artificial to our tests. Not metal, not as we would think of it, anyway. That’s why the hull didn’t show up on higher-level scans.”
“The hull?” Harold asked.
“Calibrating for our samples of the debris and… There!” She highlighted it on the screen and he almost swallowed his tongue in shock.
The map of the hill was still there but it wasn’t important anymore. Inside it, buried at a forty-degree angle facing downward, was a ship. It didn’t look like any starship he’d ever seen, resembling nothing so much as an old flying-wing bomber.
Twelve meters thick. Fifty-six meters wide at the base of the triangle. Twenty-six long. It wasn’t a big ship, similar in size to the handful of hyper-capable scouts Earth had built before Annexation.
“That’s not possible,” Wolastoq suddenly said sharply.
“I’m not arguing with you, Doctor, but it’s there.”
“No, Harold,” she said distractedly. “Not the ship—I can see the ship. There’s power.”
He was distracted for a moment by her use of his first name, then when what she’d said hit home.
“It has power,” he repeated. “It crashed fifty thousand years ago. What do you mean, it has power?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But now I’ve calibrated for the hull, I’m reading some really odd signatures: heat, electricity, even what might be gravity manipulation.
“It’s still alive, Harold.”
He met her gaze for a few seconds, then looked out the window at the mound next to them.
“Please tell me we also brought earth-moving equipment.”
#
“Aye, we can clear a hole any size you want through the dirt and rock with the surveyor’s sonics,” the pilot told them cheerfully.
Even with Wolastoq’s horrified expression, Harold would have guessed that was the wrong response to getting into a fifty-thousand-year-old crashed spacecraft.
“Your sonics, Mr. Douglas, might well clear a hole through the spaceship,” she snapped acidly. “They’re designed for mining and mineral excavation, not archaeological work. Do you have anything more controlled?”
Isaac Douglas, an older black man with a half-chewed, unlit cigar in his mouth and salt-and-pepper hair, grinned back at her around the cigar.
“O’ course,” he confirmed cheerfully. “But after all the hell you’ve put the survey team through, did you think I wasn’t gonna poke you?”
For a moment, Harold was worried the xenoarchaeologist was going to explode, and he made a distinct effort to smother his own almost-chuckle so Wolastoq didn’t hear it.
Then she swallowed, exhaled, and that brilliant grin he was starting to find distracting returned.
“Okay, Douglas, I deserved that,” she admitted. “What do we have?”
“The surveyor’s sonics have a lot of settings,” he told her. “I wasn’t pulling your leg on ‘any size’—I’d suggest we use them to clear down to about a meter of depth over the hull in our target zone.
“Then we have nano-cleaners and handheld sonics that should suffice to get us in without damaging the hull.”
He shrugged.
“I don’t know much about archaeology,” he concluded, “but that’s the process we use to try and access caves we think will have fragile crystals. If we can get into salt caves without breaking anything, I think a starship’s hull should be able to handle it.”
“We use much the same tools,” Wolastoq agreed. “And using the surveyor’s sonics to get close will save us time.” She closed her eyes in thought, then opened them again to look at Harold.
“Harold, you know starships better than I do,” she admitted. “We don’t know the hull material well, but if it’s a ship, it should have certain qualities, yes?”
“There’s a lot of variation,” he said slowly, “but yes. Plus, it survived a crash from orbit, so that gives me a minimum idea.”
Liberty, for example, would survive such a crash due to her compressed-matter armor. The old scout ships, though, the closest he’d seen to this strange vessel’s size, wouldn’t have. Their titanium hulls would have crumpled under the impact of a crash.
“Could we get closer with the heavier sonics?”
Harold nodded in thought, considering. If the ship was armored like a modern warship, the CM would laugh at the sonics. On the other hand, they still had no idea what the hull material was—it could easily be far more vulnerable to sonic vibration than to direct impact.
“We should,” he said cautiously, “but there are still risks. Probably…thirty centimeters? Maybe forty to be safe.”
“We can do that,” Douglas confirmed. “Just say the word, Doc.”
Wolastoq looked at the image on her screen of the unknown, impossible starship.
“Do it.”
#
As Harold and Wolastoq exited the surveyor craft, the escorting Guard assault shuttle swung around to drop off several of his escorts. Four power-armored Guards was probably overkill, especially with the heavily armed interface drive shuttle hovering five hundred meters above.
“Here, those suits give you extra muscle; help me move this gear!” Wolastoq told the Guards. “Thank you.”
The words were only half an afterthought, but they were enough to get two of the four soldiers moving, grabbing the heavy support pack for the handheld sonics and the canisters of nanotech goo that would do the final work.
“All right, everyone,” Douglas announced over the surveyor’s speakers. “I’m rotating fifteen meters to the left, and I’m going to clear a thirty-meter section down to forty centimeters with the surveyor’s sonics.”
He paused.
“You guys in armor would probably be fine, but I suggest everyone else stay at least this far away. Oh, and put in your earplugs. This will hurt otherwise.”
Harold was already wearing universal translator earplugs, part of the Militia’s standard-issue gear. Those would, along with their main purpose, protect his hearing from just about anything.
Wolastoq took a pair of white plastic plugs out of her suit jacket and popped them into her ears before flashing t
he floating surveyor a thumbs-up.
The aircraft swung around, extending a series of projectors as Douglas stabilized it in position above the mound covering the spaceship. A deep thrumming sound echoed around the plateau, even through the earplugs, as the sonic disruptors went to work.
At first, there was no visible change. Then the soil began to shake as the vibrations broke up the permafrost and other bonds tying it together. Then chunks of soil began to slough off the slope, followed by dust as rocks in the path of the focus beam of sound simply disintegrated.
In thirty seconds, a hole five meters by five meters by five meters opened in the side of the hill, its former contents shaken loose and spilled down onto the ground beneath their original home. Then the surveyor swung farther away from them and repeated the process.
Six times, Douglas fired up the sonic disruptors. Six times, massive amounts of soil, ice and stone were turned to dust and collapsed outward.
All that was visible inside the massive hole he’d cleared, however, were more soil, ice and rock. The surveyor could clear all the way down to the buried hull, but they had no idea what fifty thousand years buried under permafrost would have done to the hull material.
It was time to dig.
#
It had taken less than ten minutes for Douglas to clear a massive section of the hillside away. It took Harold, Wolastoq and their helpful Ducal Guards over an hour to get a roughly two-meter-by-two-meter area cleared down low enough to unleash the nano-cleaner.
The semi-intelligent agent swarmed over the dirt, picking up anything it registered as dirt or rock or ice—the target “contaminants” programmed into it this time—and moving it away. When they started, there were a few small glimpses of a strange gray material under the soil, but most of what they were seeing was still rock and ice and dirt.
Terra and Imperium (Duchy of Terra Book 3) Page 13